This patch introduces a syscall:
int set_thread_boost(int tid, int amount)
You can use this to add a permanent boost value to the effective thread
priority of any thread with your UID (or any thread in the system if
you are the superuser.)
This is quite crude, but opens up some interesting opportunities. :^)
Threads now have numeric priorities with a base priority in the 1-99
range.
Whenever a runnable thread is *not* scheduled, its effective priority
is incremented by 1. This is tracked in Thread::m_extra_priority.
The effective priority of a thread is m_priority + m_extra_priority.
When a runnable thread *is* scheduled, its m_extra_priority is reset to
zero and the effective priority returns to base.
This means that lower-priority threads will always eventually get
scheduled to run, once its effective priority becomes high enough to
exceed the base priority of threads "above" it.
The previous values for ThreadPriority (Low, Normal and High) are now
replaced as follows:
Low -> 10
Normal -> 30
High -> 50
In other words, it will take 20 ticks for a "Low" priority thread to
get to "Normal" effective priority, and another 20 to reach "High".
This is not perfect, and I've used some quite naive data structures,
but I think the mechanism will allow us to build various new and
interesting optimizations, and we can figure out better data structures
later on. :^)
This patch introduces three separate thread queues, one for each thread
priority available to userspace (Low, Normal and High.)
Each queue operates in a round-robin fashion, but we now always prefer
to schedule the highest priority thread that currently wants to run.
There are tons of tweaks and improvements that we can and should make
to this mechanism, but I think this is a step in the right direction.
This makes WindowServer significantly more responsive while one of its
clients is burning CPU. :^)
While setting up the main thread stack for a new process, we'd incur
some zero-fill page faults. This was to be expected, since we allocate
a huge stack but lazily populate it with physical pages.
The problem is that page fault handlers may enable interrupts in order
to grab a VMObject lock (or to page in from an inode.)
During exec(), a process is reorganizing itself and will be in a very
unrunnable state if the scheduler should interrupt it and then later
ask it to run again. Which is exactly what happens if the process gets
pre-empted while the new stack's zero-fill page fault grabs the lock.
This patch fixes the issue by creating new main thread stacks before
disabling interrupts and going into the critical part of exec().
I had to change the layout of RegisterDump a little bit to make the new
IRQ entry points work. This broke get_register_dump_from_stack() which
was expecting the RegisterDump to be badly aligned due to a goofy extra
16 bits which are no longer there.
The kernel now supports basic profiling of all the threads in a process
by calling profiling_enable(pid_t). You finish the profiling by calling
profiling_disable(pid_t).
This all works by recording thread stacks when the timer interrupt
fires and the current thread is in a process being profiled.
Note that symbolication is deferred until profiling_disable() to avoid
adding more noise than necessary to the profile.
A simple "/bin/profile" command is included here that can be used to
start/stop profiling like so:
$ profile 10 on
... wait ...
$ profile 10 off
After a profile has been recorded, it can be fetched in /proc/profile
There are various limits (or "bugs") on this mechanism at the moment:
- Only one process can be profiled at a time.
- We allocate 8MB for the samples, if you use more space, things will
not work, and probably break a bit.
- Things will probably fall apart if the profiled process dies during
profiling, or while extracing /proc/profile
The main thread of each kernel/user process will take the name of
the process. Extra threads will get a fancy new name
"ProcessName[<tid>]".
Thread backtraces now list the thread name in addtion to tid.
Add the thread name to /proc/all (should it get its own proc
file?).
Add two new syscalls, set_thread_name and get_thread_name.
This patch adds these I/O counters to each thread:
- (Inode) file read bytes
- (Inode) file write bytes
- Unix socket read bytes
- Unix socket write bytes
- IPv4 socket read bytes
- IPv4 socket write bytes
These are then exposed in /proc/all and seen in SystemMonitor.
Instead of using the generic block mechanism, wait-queued threads now
go into the special Queued state.
This fixes an issue where signal dispatch would unblock a wait-queued
thread (because signal dispatch unblocks blocked threads) and cause
confusion since the thread only expected to be awoken by the queue.
Instead of waking up repeatedly to check if a disk operation has
finished, use a WaitQueue and wake it up in the IRQ handler.
This simplifies the device driver a bit, and makes it more responsive
as well :^)
There was a race window between instantiating a WaitQueueBlocker and
setting the thread state to Blocked. If a thread was preempted between
those steps, someone else might try to wake the wait queue and find an
unblocked thread in a wait queue, which is not sane.
The kernel's Lock class now uses a proper wait queue internally instead
of just having everyone wake up regularly to try to acquire the lock.
We also keep the donation mechanism, so that whenever someone tries to
take the lock and fails, that thread donates the remainder of its
timeslice to the current lock holder.
After unlocking a Lock, the unlocking thread calls WaitQueue::wake_one,
which unblocks the next thread in queue.
Add an initial implementation of pthread attributes for:
* detach state (joinable, detached)
* schedule params (just priority)
* guard page size (as skeleton) (requires kernel support maybe?)
* stack size and user-provided stack location (4 or 8 MB only, must be aligned)
Add some tests too, to the thread test program.
Also, LibC: Move pthread declarations to sys/types.h, where they belong.
Have pthread_create() allocate a stack and passing it to the kernel
instead of this work happening in the kernel. The more of this we can
do in userspace, the better.
This patch also unexposes the raw create_thread() and exit_thread()
syscalls since they are now only used by LibPthread anyway.
It's now possible to block until another thread in the same process has
exited. We can also retrieve its exit value, which is whatever value it
passed to pthread_exit(). :^)
While executing in the kernel, a thread can acquire various resources
that need cleanup, such as locks and references to RefCounted objects.
This cleanup normally happens on the exit path, such as in destructors
for various RAII guards. But we weren't calling those exit paths when
killing threads that have been executing in the kernel, such as threads
blocked on reading or sleeping, thus causing leaks.
This commit changes how killing threads works. Now, instead of killing
a thread directly, one is supposed to call thread->set_should_die(),
which will unblock it and make it unwind the stack if it is blocked
in the kernel. Then, just before returning to the userspace, the thread
will automatically die.
Scheduling priority is now set at the thread level instead of at the
process level.
This is a step towards allowing processes to set different priorities
for threads. There's no userspace API for that yet, since only the main
thread's priority is affected by sched_setparam().
dispatch_signal() expected a RegisterDump on the kernel stack. However
in certain cases, like just after a clone, this was not the case and
dispatch_signal() would instead write to an incorrect user stack pointer.
We now use the threads TSS in situations where the RegisterDump may not
be valid, fixing the issue.
Make userspace stacks lazily allocated and allow them to grow up to
4 megabytes. This avoids a lot of silly crashes we were running into
with software expecting much larger stacks. :^)
Thread::make_userspace_stack_for_main_thread is only ever called from
Process::do_exec, after all the fun ELF loading and TSS setup has
occured.
The calculations in there that check if the combined argv + envp
size will exceed the default stack size are not used in the rest of
the stack setup. So, it should be safe to move this to the beginning
of do_exec and bail early with -E2BIG, just like the man pages say.
Additionally, advertise this limit in limits.h to be a good POSIX.1
citizen. :)
We were leaking 512 bytes of kmalloc memory for every new thread.
This patch fixes that, and also makes sure to zero out the FPU state
buffer after allocating it, and finally also makes the LogStream
operator<< for Thread look a little bit nicer. :^)
Now programs can catch the SIGSEGV signal when they segfault.
This commit also introduced the send_urgent_signal_to_self method,
which is needed to send signals to a thread when handling exceptions
caused by the same thread.
This simplifies the ownership model and makes Region easier to reason
about. Userspace Regions are now primarily kept by Process::m_regions.
Kernel Regions are kept in various OwnPtr<Regions>'s.
Regions now only ever get unmapped when they are destroyed.
Due to the changes in signal handling m_kernel_stack_for_signal_handler_region
and m_signal_stack_user_region are no longer necessary, and so, have been
removed. I've also removed the similarly reduntant m_tss_to_resume_kernel.
This patch adds support for TLS according to the x86 System V ABI.
Each thread gets a thread-specific memory region, and the GS segment
register always points _to a pointer_ to the thread-specific memory.
In other words, to access thread-local variables, userspace programs
start by dereferencing the pointer at [gs:0].
The Process keeps a master copy of the TLS segment that new threads
should use, and when a new thread is created, they get a copy of it.
It's basically whatever the PT_TLS program header in the ELF says.
This was a workaround to be able to build on case-insensitive file
systems where it might get confused about <string.h> vs <String.h>.
Let's just not support building that way, so String.h can have an
objectively nicer name. :^)
This commit drastically changes how signals are handled.
In the case that an unblocked thread is signaled it works much
in the same way as previously. However, when a blocking syscall
is interrupted, we set up the signal trampoline on the user
stack, complete the blocking syscall, return down the kernel
stack and then jump to the handler. This means that from the
kernel stack's perspective, we only ever get one system call deep.
The signal trampoline has also been changed in order to properly
store the return value from system calls. This is necessary due
to the new way we exit from signaled system calls.
Each Function is a heap allocation, so let's make an effort to avoid
doing that during scheduling. Because of header dependencies, I had to
put the runnables iteration helpers in Thread.h, which is a bit meh but
at least this cuts out all the kmalloc() traffic in pick_next().
Instead of dumping the dying thread's backtrace in the signal handling
code, wait until we're finalizing the thread. Since signalling happens
during scheduling, the less work we do there the better.
Basically the less that happens during a scheduler pass the better. :^)
We were forgetting where we put the userspace thread stacks, so added a
member called Thread::m_userspace_thread_stack to keep track of it.
Then, in ~Thread(), we now deallocate the userspace, kernel and signal
stacks (if present.)
Out of curiosity, the "init_stage2" process doesn't have a kernel stack
which I found surprising. :^)
This makes assertion failures generate backtraces again. Sorry to everyone
who suffered from the lack of backtraces lately. :^)
We share code with the /proc/PID/stack implementation. You can now get the
current backtrace for a Thread via Thread::backtrace(), and all the traces
for a Process via Process::backtrace().
With the presence of signal handlers, it is possible that a thread might
be blocked multiple times. Picture for instance a signal handler using
read(), or wait() while the thread is already blocked elsewhere before
the handler is invoked.
To fix this, we turn m_blocker into a chain of handlers. Each block()
call now prepends to the list, and unblocking will only consider the
most recent (first) blocker in the chain.
Fixes#309
The only two places we set m_blocker now are Thread::set_state(), and
Thread::block(). set_state is mostly just an issue of clarity: we don't
want to end up with state() != Blocked with an m_blocker, because that's
weird. It's also possible: if we yield, someone else may set_state() us.
We also now set_state() and set m_blocker under lock in block(), rather
than unlocking which might allow someone else to mess with our internals
while we're in the process of trying to block.
This seems to fix sending STOP & CONT causing a panic.
My guess as to what was happening is this:
thread A blocks in select(): Blocking & m_blocker != nullptr
thread B sends SIGSTOP: Stopped & m_blocker != nullptr
thread B sends SIGCONT: we continue execution. Runnable & m_blocker != nullptr
thread A tries to block in select() again:
* sets m_blocker
* unlocks (in block_helper)
* someone else tries to unblock us? maybe from the old m_blocker? unclear -- clears m_blocker
* sets Blocked (while unlocked!)
So, thread A is left with state Blocked & m_blocker == nullptr, leading
to the scheduler assert (m_blocker != nullptr) failing.
Long story short, let's do all our data management with the lock _held_.
And use this to return EINTR in various places; some of which we were
not handling properly before.
This might expose a few bugs in userspace, but should be more compatible
with other POSIX systems, and is certainly a little cleaner.
