this is the first step in an overhaul aimed at greatly simplifying and
optimizing everything dealing with thread-local state.
previously, the thread pointer was initialized lazily on first access,
or at program startup if stack protector was in use, or at certain
random places where inconsistent state could be reached if it were not
initialized early. while believed to be fully correct, the logic was
fragile and non-obvious.
in the first phase of the thread pointer overhaul, support is retained
(and in some cases improved) for systems/situation where loading the
thread pointer fails, e.g. old kernels.
some notes on specific changes:
- the confusing use of libc.main_thread as an indicator that the
thread pointer is initialized is eliminated in favor of an explicit
has_thread_pointer predicate.
- sigaction no longer needs to ensure that the thread pointer is
initialized before installing a signal handler (this was needed to
prevent a situation where the signal handler caused the thread
pointer to be initialized and the subsequent sigreturn cleared it
again) but it still needs to ensure that implementation-internal
thread-related signals are not blocked.
- pthread tsd initialization for the main thread is deferred in a new
manner to minimize bloat in the static-linked __init_tp code.
- pthread_setcancelstate no longer needs special handling for the
situation before the thread pointer is initialized. it simply fails
on systems that cannot support a thread pointer, which are
non-conforming anyway.
- pthread_cleanup_push/pop now check for missing thread pointer and
nop themselves out in this case, so stdio no longer needs to avoid
the cancellable path when the thread pointer is not available.
a number of cases remain where certain interfaces may crash if the
system does not support a thread pointer. at this point, these should
be limited to pthread interfaces, and the number of such cases should
be fewer than before.
some functions that should have been testing whether pthread_self()
had been called and initialized the thread pointer were instead
testing whether pthread_create() had been called and actually made the
program "threaded". while it's unlikely any mismatch would occur in
real-world problems, this could have introduced subtle bugs. now, we
store the address of the main thread's thread descriptor in the libc
structure and use its presence as a flag that the thread register is
initialized. note that after fork, the calling thread (not necessarily
the original main thread) is the new main thread.
the goal is to be able to use pthread_setcancelstate internally in
the implementation, whenever a function might want to use functions
which are cancellation points but avoid becoming a cancellation point
itself. i could have just used a separate internal function for
temporarily inhibiting cancellation, but the solution in this commit
is better because (1) it's one less implementation-specific detail in
functions that need to use it, and (2) application code can also get
the same benefit.
previously, pthread_setcancelstate dependend on pthread_self, which
would pull in unwanted thread setup overhead for non-threaded
programs. now, it temporarily stores the state in the global libc
struct if threads have not been initialized, and later moves it if
needed. this way we can instead use __pthread_self, which has no
dependencies and assumes that the thread register is already valid.
we take advantage of the fact that unless self->cancelpt is 1,
cancellation cannot happen. so just increment it by 2 to temporarily
block cancellation. this drops pthread_create.o well under 1k.
with these small changes, libc functions which need to call functions
which are cancellation points, but which themselves must not be
cancellation points, can use the CANCELPT_INHIBIT and CANCELPT_RESUME
macros to temporarily inhibit all cancellation.
