Irqs can now touch runqueues and do async wakeups. This necessitated
that we implement all wake up wait and runqueue locking work with irqs.
All this, assumes that in an SMP setup we may have cross-cpu wake ups,
runqueue manipulation. If we later decide that we only wake up threads
in the current container, (and lock containers to cpus) we won't really
need spinlocks, or irq disabling anymore. The current set up might be
trivially less responsive, but is more flexible.
The first one is related to resource recycling. The parent which is waiting its
child to exit did not delete its ktcb. Now, it deletes.
The second one is related to self destroy. The added code wakes up all the
waiters before it exits.
Thread ids now contain their container ids in the top 2 nibbles.
Threads on other containers can be addressed by changing those
two nibbles. The addressing of inter-container threads are
subject to capabilities.
Multi-threaded apps can now wait on children to destroy.
WAIT_ON is useful when a child exists with an exit code and the pager
of the child does not want to take the hassle of destorying it via an
ipc. It provides an alternative method of synchronous thread destruction,
where the child destroys itself directly rather than the parent issuing
a destroy on it explicitly.
Pagers kill all children but suspend themselves.
Currently not straightforward for a pager to delete its own tcb and quit.
It should take all allocator locks without sleeping, remove itself from
scheduler queue and then delete itself and quit. This is not so easy now
as some allocation locks are mutexes. (Address space lock, ktcb/space
allocators etc.)
An easier approach would be to have a kernel thread or a superior thread
that would delete the pager
Reiterating again to simplify:
Working:
- Pager issues destroy, client also issues exit
they work in sync.
Missing
- Pager killing itself
- Pager killing all children while killing itself
- Pager waiting on children
One is related to the time distribution when a new child is created.
If the parent has one tick left, then both child and parent received
zero tick. When combined with
current_irq_nest_count = 1
voluntary_preempt = 0
values, this caused the scheduler from being invoked.
Second is related to the overall time distribution. When a thread
runs out of time, its new time slice is calculated by the below
formula:
new_timeslice = (thread_prio * SCHED_TICKS) / total_prio
If we consider total_prio is equal to the sum of the priorities of
all the threads in the system, it imposes a problem of getting
zero tick. In the new scenario, total_prio is equal to the priority
types in the system so it is fixed. Every thread gets a timeslice
in proportion of their priorities. Thus, there is no risk of taking
zero tick.
Capability checking for thread_control, exregs, mutex, cap_control,
ipc, and map system calls.
The visualised model is implemented in code that compiles, but
actual functionality hasn't been tested.
Need to add:
- Dynamic assignment of initial resources matching with what's
defined in the configuration.
- A paged-thread-group, since that would be a logical group of
seperation from a capability point-of-view.
- Resource ids for various tasks. E.g.
- Memory capabilities don't have target resources.
- Thread capability assumes current container for THREAD_CREATE.
- Mutex syscall assumes current thread (this one may not need
any changing)
- cap_control syscall assumes current thread. It may happen to
be that another thread's capability list is manipulated.
Last but not least:
- A simple and easy-to-use userspace library for dynamic expansion
of resource domains as new resources are created such as threads.
Pagers can now share their own private capabilities with their
paged children, or their siblings with whom they have a common pager
ancestor.
Added flags CAP_SHARE_CHILD and CAP_SHARE_SIBLINGS for that.
Notion of pager hierarchy introduced using the existing but unused
pagerid field.
Thread creation now has two more flags TC_AS_PAGER and TC_SHARE_PAGER.
The former sets creator as pager, the latter sets creator's pager as pager.
Thread group capability sharing now correctly carries shared capabilities
to the thread group leader's tgr_cap_list list, and this list is checked
during capability checking.
Added support for pagers that fault to suspend and become zombies
along with all the threads that they manage. Zombie killing is to
be done at a later time, from this special zombie queue.
The implementation works same as a suspension, with the added action
that the thread is moved to a queue in kernel container.
Issues:
- A page-faulting thread suspends if receives -1 from pager page fault ipc.
This is fine if pager is about to delete the thread, but it is not if
it is a buggy pager.
- Need to find a way to completely get rid of suspended pager.
- A method of deleting suspended tasks could remedy both cases above.
Upon fork, child was created in a new space but as a copy of any
cloned thread in the parent space. This was due to the search of forker thread
by its space id (which is shared among many cloned threads).
Now fixed.
modified: src/api/thread.c
modified: tasks/mm0/src/task.c
- Proper releasing of user pmd and pgds when a space is not used.
- Proper releasing of task, space ids.
- At occasions a starting thread gets bogus SPSR, this needs investigating.
- At a very rare occasion arch_setup_new_thread() had a kernel data abort during
register copying from one task to another. Needs investigating.
- Fixed potential concurrency bugs due to preemption being enabled.
- Introduced a new address space structure to better account for
address spaces and page tables.
- Currently executes fine up to forking. Will investigate.
- KIP's pointer to UTCB seems to work with existing l4lib ipc functions.
- Works up to clone()
- In clone we mmap() the same UTCB on each new thread - excessive.
- Generally during page fault handling, cloned threads may fault on the same page
multiple times even though a single handling would be enough for all of them.
Need to detect and handle this.