Now that we've switched over to using the vDSO on CloudABI, it becomes a
lot easier for us to phase out old features. System call numbering is no
longer something that's part of the ABI. It's fully based on names. As
long as the numbering used by the kernel and the vDSO is consistent
(which it always is), it's all right.
Let's put this to the test by removing a system call (thread_tcb_set())
that's already unused for quite some time now, but was only left intact
to serve as a placeholder. Sync in the new system call table that uses
alphabetic sorting of system calls.
Obtained from: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi
The type definitions and constants that were used by COMPAT_CLOUDABI64
are a literal copy of some headers stored inside of CloudABI's C
library, cloudlibc. What is annoying is that we can't make use of
cloudlibc's system call list, as the format is completely different and
doesn't provide enough information. It had to be synced in manually.
We recently decided to solve this (and some other problems) by moving
the ABI definitions into a separate file:
https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi/blob/master/cloudabi.txt
This file is processed by a pile of Python scripts to generate the
header files like before, documentation (markdown), but in our case more
importantly: a FreeBSD system call table.
This change discards the old files in sys/contrib/cloudabi and replaces
them by the latest copies, which requires some minor changes here and
there. Because cloudabi.txt also enforces consistent names of the system
call arguments, we have to patch up a small number of system call
implementations to use the new argument names.
The new header files can also be included directly in FreeBSD kernel
space without needing any includes/defines, so we can now remove
cloudabi_syscalldefs.h and cloudabi64_syscalldefs.h. Patch up the
sources to include the definitions directly from sys/contrib/cloudabi
instead.
CloudABI is a pure capability-based runtime environment for UNIX. It
works similar to Capsicum, except that processes already run in
capabilities mode on startup. All functionality that conflicts with this
model has been omitted, making it a compact binary interface that can be
supported by other operating systems without too much effort.
CloudABI is 'secure by default'; the idea is that it should be safe to
run arbitrary third-party binaries without requiring any explicit
hardware virtualization (Bhyve) or namespace virtualization (Jails). The
rights of an application are purely determined by the set of file
descriptors that you grant it on startup.
The datatypes and constants used by CloudABI's C library (cloudlibc) are
defined in separate files called syscalldefs_mi.h (pointer size
independent) and syscalldefs_md.h (pointer size dependent). We import
these files in sys/contrib/cloudabi and wrap around them in
cloudabi*_syscalldefs.h.
We then add stubs for all of the system calls in sys/compat/cloudabi or
sys/compat/cloudabi64, depending on whether the system call depends on
the pointer size. We only have nine system calls that depend on the
pointer size. If we ever want to support 32-bit binaries, we can simply
add sys/compat/cloudabi32 and implement these nine system calls again.
The next step is to send in code reviews for the individual system call
implementations, but also add a sysentvec, to allow CloudABI executabled
to be started through execve().
More information about CloudABI:
- GitHub: https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudlibc
- Talk at BSDCan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVdF84x1EdA
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2848
Reviewed by: emaste, brooks
Obtained from: https://github.com/NuxiNL/freebsd
