The last half year I've been working on a replacement TTY layer for the
FreeBSD kernel. The new TTY layer was designed to improve the following:
- Improved driver model:
The old TTY layer has a driver model that is not abstract enough to
make it friendly to use. A good example is the output path, where the
device drivers directly access the output buffers. This means that an
in-kernel PPP implementation must always convert network buffers into
TTY buffers.
If a PPP implementation would be built on top of the new TTY layer
(still needs a hooks layer, though), it would allow the PPP
implementation to directly hand the data to the TTY driver.
- Improved hotplugging:
With the old TTY layer, it isn't entirely safe to destroy TTY's from
the system. This implementation has a two-step destructing design,
where the driver first abandons the TTY. After all threads have left
the TTY, the TTY layer calls a routine in the driver, which can be
used to free resources (unit numbers, etc).
The pts(4) driver also implements this feature, which means
posix_openpt() will now return PTY's that are created on the fly.
- Improved performance:
One of the major improvements is the per-TTY mutex, which is expected
to improve scalability when compared to the old Giant locking.
Another change is the unbuffered copying to userspace, which is both
used on TTY device nodes and PTY masters.
Upgrading should be quite straightforward. Unlike previous versions,
existing kernel configuration files do not need to be changed, except
when they reference device drivers that are listed in UPDATING.
Obtained from: //depot/projects/mpsafetty/...
Approved by: philip (ex-mentor)
Discussed: on the lists, at BSDCan, at the DevSummit
Sponsored by: Snow B.V., the Netherlands
dcons(4) fixed by: kan
semaphores. Specifically, semaphores are now represented as new file
descriptor type that is set to close on exec. This removes the need for
all of the manual process reference counting (and fork, exec, and exit
event handlers) as the normal file descriptor operations handle all of
that for us nicely. It is also suggested as one possible implementation
in the spec and at least one other OS (OS X) uses this approach.
Some bugs that were fixed as a result include:
- References to a named semaphore whose name is removed still work after
the sem_unlink() operation. Prior to this patch, if a semaphore's name
was removed, valid handles from sem_open() would get EINVAL errors from
sem_getvalue(), sem_post(), etc. This fixes that.
- Unnamed semaphores created with sem_init() were not cleaned up when a
process exited or exec'd. They were only cleaned up if the process
did an explicit sem_destroy(). This could result in a leak of semaphore
objects that could never be cleaned up.
- On the other hand, if another process guessed the id (kernel pointer to
'struct ksem' of an unnamed semaphore (created via sem_init)) and had
write access to the semaphore based on UID/GID checks, then that other
process could manipulate the semaphore via sem_destroy(), sem_post(),
sem_wait(), etc.
- As part of the permission check (UID/GID), the umask of the proces
creating the semaphore was not honored. Thus if your umask denied group
read/write access but the explicit mode in the sem_init() call allowed
it, the semaphore would be readable/writable by other users in the
same group, for example. This includes access via the previous bug.
- If the module refused to unload because there were active semaphores,
then it might have deregistered one or more of the semaphore system
calls before it noticed that there was a problem. I'm not sure if
this actually happened as the order that modules are discovered by the
kernel linker depends on how the actual .ko file is linked. One can
make the order deterministic by using a single module with a mod_event
handler that explicitly registers syscalls (and deregisters during
unload after any checks). This also fixes a race where even if the
sem_module unloaded first it would have destroyed locks that the
syscalls might be trying to access if they are still executing when
they are unloaded.
XXX: By the way, deregistering system calls doesn't do any blocking
to drain any threads from the calls.
- Some minor fixes to errno values on error. For example, sem_init()
isn't documented to return ENFILE or EMFILE if we run out of semaphores
the way that sem_open() can. Instead, it should return ENOSPC in that
case.
Other changes:
- Kernel semaphores now use a hash table to manage the namespace of
named semaphores nearly in a similar fashion to the POSIX shared memory
object file descriptors. Kernel semaphores can now also have names
longer than 14 chars (up to MAXPATHLEN) and can include subdirectories
in their pathname.
- The UID/GID permission checks for access to a named semaphore are now
done via vaccess() rather than a home-rolled set of checks.
- Now that kernel semaphores have an associated file object, the various
MAC checks for POSIX semaphores accept both a file credential and an
active credential. There is also a new posixsem_check_stat() since it
is possible to fstat() a semaphore file descriptor.
- A small set of regression tests (using the ksem API directly) is present
in src/tools/regression/posixsem.
Reported by: kris (1)
Tested by: kris
Reviewed by: rwatson (lightly)
MFC after: 1 month
directory, and jail directory within procstat. While this functionality
is available already in fstat, encapsulating it in the kern.proc.filedesc
sysctl makes it accessible without using kvm and thus without needing
elevated permissions.
The new procstat output looks like:
PID COMM FD T V FLAGS REF OFFSET PRO NAME
76792 tcsh cwd v d -------- - - - /usr/src
76792 tcsh root v d -------- - - - /
76792 tcsh 15 v c rw------ 16 9130 - -
76792 tcsh 16 v c rw------ 16 9130 - -
76792 tcsh 17 v c rw------ 16 9130 - -
76792 tcsh 18 v c rw------ 16 9130 - -
76792 tcsh 19 v c rw------ 16 9130 - -
I am also bumping __FreeBSD_version for this as this new feature will be
used in at least one port.
Reviewed by: rwatson
Approved by: rwatson
no per-thread name is available or the name is identical to the
process name, display "-" instead. Very slightly shrink the COMM
entry to make a bit more room, although this doesn't help with
stack traces much.
Suggested by: thompsa
of the missing functionality from procfs(4) and new functionality for
monitoring and debugging specific processes. procstat(1) operates in
the following modes:
-b Display binary information for the process.
-c Display command line arguments for the process.
-f Display file descriptor information for the process.
-k Display the stacks of kernel threads in the process.
-s Display security credential information for the process.
-t Display thread information for the process.
-v Display virtual memory mappings for the process.
Further revision and modes are expected.
Testing, ideas, etc: cognet, sam, Skip Ford <skip at menantico dot com>
Wesley Shields <wxs at atarininja dot org>
