While the KSE project was quite successful in bringing threading to
FreeBSD, the M:N approach taken by the kse library was never developed
to its full potential. Backwards compatibility will be provided via
libmap.conf for dynamically linked binaries and static binaries will
be broken.
flags. We now create asynchronous contexts or syscall contexts only.
Syscall contexts differ from the minimal ABI dictated contexts by
having the scratch registers saved and restored because that's where
we keep the syscall arguments and syscall return values.
Since this change affects KSE, have it use kse_switchin(2) for the
"new" syscall context.
use set_mcontext() to restore the context in sigreturn(). Since we
put the syscall number and the syscall arguments in the trapframe
(we don't save the scratch registers for syscalls, which allows us
to reuse the space to our advantage), create a MD specific flag so
that we save the scratch registers even for syscalls. We would not
be able to restart a syscall otherwise.
The signal trampoline does not need to flush the regiters anymore,
because get_mcontext() already handles that. In fact, if we set up
the context correctly, we do not need to have a trampoline at all.
This change however only minimally changes the trampoline code. In
follow-up commits this can be further optimized.
Note that normally we preserve cfm and iip in the trapframe created
by the EPC syscall path when we restore a context in set_mcontext()
because those fields are not normally set for a synchronuous context.
The kernel puts the return address and frame info of the syscall
stub in there. By preserving these fields we hide this detail from
userland which allows us to use setcontext(2) for user created
contexts. However, sigreturn() is commonly called from the trampoline,
which means that if we preserve cfm and iip in all cases, we would
return to the trampoline after the sigreturn(), which means we hit
the safety net: we call exit(2). So, we do not preserve cfm and iip
when we have a synchronous context that also has scratch registers
(the uncommon context created by sendsig() only), under the assumption
that if such a context is created in userland, something special is
going on and the use of cfm and iip is then just another quirk. All
this is invisible in the common case.
when we create contexts. The meaning of the flags are documented in
<machine/ucontext.h>. I only list them here to help browsing the
commit logs:
_MC_FLAGS_ASYNC_CONTEXT
_MC_FLAGS_HIGHFP_VALID
_MC_FLAGS_KSE_SET_MBOX
_MC_FLAGS_RETURN_VALID
_MC_FLAGS_SCRATCH_VALID
Yes, _MC_FLAGS_KSE_SET_MBOX is a hack and I'm proud of it :-)
prime objectives are:
o Implement a syscall path based on the epc inststruction (see
sys/ia64/ia64/syscall.s).
o Revisit the places were we need to save and restore registers
and define those contexts in terms of the register sets (see
sys/ia64/include/_regset.h).
Secundairy objectives:
o Remove the requirement to use contigmalloc for kernel stacks.
o Better handling of the high FP registers for SMP systems.
o Switch to the new cpu_switch() and cpu_throw() semantics.
o Add a good unwinder to reconstruct contexts for the rare
cases we need to (see sys/contrib/ia64/libuwx)
Many files are affected by this change. Functionally it boils
down to:
o The EPC syscall doesn't preserve registers it does not need
to preserve and places the arguments differently on the stack.
This affects libc and truss.
o The address of the kernel page directory (kptdir) had to
be unstaticized for use by the nested TLB fault handler.
The name has been changed to ia64_kptdir to avoid conflicts.
The renaming affects libkvm.
o The trapframe only contains the special registers and the
scratch registers. For syscalls using the EPC syscall path
no scratch registers are saved. This affects all places where
the trapframe is accessed. Most notably the unaligned access
handler, the signal delivery code and the debugger.
o Context switching only partly saves the special registers
and the preserved registers. This affects cpu_switch() and
triggered the move to the new semantics, which additionally
affects cpu_throw().
o The high FP registers are either in the PCB or on some
CPU. context switching for them is done lazily. This affects
trap().
o The mcontext has room for all registers, but not all of them
have to be defined in all cases. This mostly affects signal
delivery code now. The *context syscalls are as of yet still
unimplemented.
Many details went into the removal of the requirement to use
contigmalloc for kernel stacks. The details are mostly CPU
specific and limited to exception_save() and exception_restore().
The few places where we create, destroy or switch stacks were
mostly simplified by not having to construct physical addresses
and additionally saving the virtual addresses for later use.
Besides more efficient context saving and restoring, which of
course yields a noticable speedup, this also fixes the dreaded
SMP bootup problem as a side-effect. The details of which are
still not fully understood.
This change includes all the necessary backward compatibility
code to have it handle older userland binaries that use the
break instruction for syscalls. Support for break-based syscalls
has been pessimized in favor of a clean implementation. Due to
the overall better performance of the kernel, this will still
be notived as an improvement if it's noticed at all.
Approved by: re@ (jhb)
* Fixes to the signal delivery code. Not quite right yet.
I would have preferred to wait until I have signal delivery actually
working but the current kernel in CVS doesn't build.
not work on any real hardware (or fully work on any simulator). Much more
needs to happen before this is actually functional but its nice to see
the FreeBSD copyright message appear in the ia64 simulator.
