this is a case of poorly written man pages not matching the actual
implementation, and why i hate implementing nonstandard interfaces
with no actual documentation of how they're intended to work.
this bug was introduced in a recent patch. the problem we're working
around is that broken GNU software wants to use "struct siginfo"
rather than "siginfo_t", but "siginfo" is not in the reserved
namespace and thus not legal for the standard header to use.
really wchar_t should never vary, but the ARM EABI defines it as an
unsigned 32-bit int instead of a signed one, and gcc follows this
nonsense. thus, to give a conformant environment, we have to follow
(otherwise L""[0] and L'\0' would be 0U rather than 0, but the
application would be unaware due to a mismatched definition for
WCHAR_MIN and WCHAR_MAX, and Bad Things could happen with respect to
signed/unsigned comparisons, promotions, etc.).
fortunately no rules are imposed by the C standard on the relationship
between wchar_t and wint_t, and WEOF has type wint_t, so we can still
make wint_t always-signed and use -1 for WEOF.
this port assumes eabi calling conventions, eabi linux syscall
convention, and presence of the kernel helpers at 0xffff0f?0 needed
for threads support. otherwise it makes very few assumptions, and the
code should work even on armv4 without thumb support, as well as on
systems with thumb interworking. the bits headers declare this a
little endian system, but as far as i can tell the code should work
equally well on big endian.
some small details are probably broken; so far, testing has been
limited to qemu/aboriginal linux.
several things are changed. first, i have removed the old __uniclone
function signature and replaced it with the "standard" linux
__clone/clone signature. this was necessary to expose clone to
applications anyway, and it makes it easier to port __clone to new
archs, since it's now testable independently of pthread_create.
secondly, i have removed all references to the ugly ldt descriptor
structure (i386 only) from the c code and pthread structure. in places
where it is needed, it is now created on the stack just when it's
needed, in assembly code. thus, the i386 __clone function takes the
desired thread pointer as its argument, rather than an ldt descriptor
pointer, just like on all other sane archs. this should not affect
applications since there is really no way an application can use clone
with threads/tls in a way that doesn't horribly conflict with and
clobber the underlying implementation's use. applications are expected
to use clone only for creating actual processes, possibly with new
namespace features and whatnot.
eventually we may have a working "generic" implementation for archs
that don't need anything special. in any case, the goal of having
stubs like this is to allow early testing of new ports before all the
details needed for threads have been filled in. more functions like
this will follow.
actually these are just weak aliases for the normal locking versions
right now, and they will probably stay that way since making them
lock-free without slowing down the normal versions would require
significant code duplication for no benefit.
programs that use this tend to horribly botch international text
support, so it's questionable whether we want to support it even in
the long term... for now, it's just a dummy that calls strcmp.
on spurious wakeups/returns from __timedwait, pthread_join would
"succeed" and unmap the thread's stack while it was still running. at
best this would lead to SIGSEGV when the thread resumed execution, but
in the worst case, the thread would later resume executing on top of
another new thread's stack mapped at the same address.
spent about 4 hours tracking this bug down, chasing rare
difficult-to-reproduce stack corruption in a stress test program.
still no idea *what* caused the spurious wakeups; i suspect it's a
kernel bug.
this seeme to be the bug that prevented enabling of private futex
support. i'm going to hold off on switching to private futexes until
after the next release, and until i get a chance to audit all
wait/wake calls to make sure they're using the correct private
argument, but with this change it should be safe to enable private
futex support.
null termination is only added when current size grows.
in update modes, null termination is not added if it does not fit
(i.e. it is not allowed to clobber data).
these rules make very little sense, but that's how it goes..
read should not be allowed past "current size".
append mode should write at "current size", not buffer size.
null termination should not be written except when "current size" grows.
this is not strictly required by the standard, but without it, there
is a race condition where cancellation arriving just before async
cancellation is enabled might not be acted upon. it is impossible for
a conforming application to work around this race condition since
calling pthread_testcancel after setting async cancellation mode is
not allowed (pthread_testcancel is not specified to be
async-cancel-safe). thus the implementation should be responsible for
eliminating the race, from a quality-of-implementation standpoint.
Rich Felker