the main motivation for this change is to remove the assumption that
the tid of the main thread is also the pid of the process. (the value
returned by the set_tid_address syscall was used to fill both fields
despite it semantically being the tid.) this is historically and
presently true on linux and unlikely to change, but it conceivably
could be false on other systems that otherwise reproduce the linux
syscall api/abi.
only a few parts of the code were actually still using the cached pid.
in a couple places (aio and synccall) it was a minor optimization to
avoid a syscall. caching could be reintroduced, but lazily as part of
the public getpid function rather than at program startup, if it's
deemed important for performance later. in other places (cancellation
and pthread_kill) the pid was completely unnecessary; the tkill
syscall can be used instead of tgkill. this is actually a rather
subtle issue, since tgkill is supposedly a solution to race conditions
that can affect use of tkill. however, as documented in the commit
message for commit 7779dbd2663269b465951189b4f43e70839bc073, tgkill
does not actually solve this race; it just limits it to happening
within one process rather than between processes. we use a lock that
avoids the race in pthread_kill, and the use in the cancellation
signal handler is self-targeted and thus not subject to tid reuse
races, so both are safe regardless of which syscall (tgkill or tkill)
is used.
this protects against deadlock from spurious signals (e.g. sent by
another process) arriving after the controlling thread releases the
other threads from the sync operation.
the head pointer was not being reset between calls to synccall, so any
use of this interface more than once would build the linked list
incorrectly, keeping the (now invalid) list nodes from the previous
call.
they have already blocked signals before decrementing the thread
count, so the code being removed is unreachable in the case where the
thread is no longer counted.
the issue at hand is that many syscalls require as an argument the
kernel-ABI size of sigset_t, intended to allow the kernel to switch to
a larger sigset_t in the future. previously, each arch was defining
this size in syscall_arch.h, which was redundant with the definition
of _NSIG in bits/signal.h. as it's used in some not-quite-portable
application code as well, _NSIG is much more likely to be recognized
and understood immediately by someone reading the code, and it's also
shorter and less cluttered.
note that _NSIG is actually 65/129, not 64/128, but the division takes
care of throwing away the off-by-one part.
this mirrors the stdio_impl.h cleanup. one header which is not
strictly needed, errno.h, is left in pthread_impl.h, because since
pthread functions return their error codes rather than using errno,
nearly every single pthread function needs the errno constants.
in a few places, rather than bringing in string.h to use memset, the
memset was replaced by direct assignment. this seems to generate much
better code anyway, and makes many functions which were previously
non-leaf functions into leaf functions (possibly eliminating a great
deal of bloat on some platforms where non-leaf functions require ugly
prologue and/or epilogue).
unlike other implementations, this one reserves memory for new TLS in
all pre-existing threads at dlopen-time, and dlopen will fail with no
resources consumed and no new libraries loaded if memory is not
available. memory is not immediately distributed to running threads;
that would be too complex and too costly. instead, assurances are made
that threads needing the new TLS can obtain it in an async-signal-safe
way from a buffer belonging to the dynamic linker/new module (via
atomic fetch-and-add based allocator).
I've re-appropriated the lock that was previously used for __synccall
(synchronizing set*id() syscalls between threads) as a general
pthread_create lock. it's a "backwards" rwlock where the "read"
operation is safe atomic modification of the live thread count, which
multiple threads can perform at the same time, and the "write"
operation is making sure the count does not increase during an
operation that depends on it remaining bounded (__synccall or dlopen).
in static-linked programs that don't use __synccall, this lock is a
no-op and has no cost.
some minor changes to how hard-coded sets for thread-related purposes
are handled were also needed, since the old object sizes were not
necessarily sufficient. things have gotten a bit ugly in this area,
and i think a cleanup is in order at some point, but for now the goal
is just to get the code working on all supported archs including mips,
which was badly broken by linux rejecting syscalls with the wrong
sigset_t size.
i made a best attempt, but the intended semantics of this function are
fundamentally contradictory. there is no consistent way to handle
ownership of locks when forking a multi-threaded process. the code
could have worked by accident for programs that only used normal
mutexes and nothing else (since they don't actually store or care
about their owner), but that's about it. broken-by-design interfaces
that aren't even in glibc (only solaris) don't belong in musl.
fix up clone signature to match the actual behavior. the new
__syncall_wait function allows a __synccall callback to wait for other
threads to continue without returning, so that it can resume action
after the caller finishes. this interface could be made significantly
more general/powerful with minimal effort, but i'll wait to do that
until it's actually useful for something.
changing credentials in a multi-threaded program is extremely
difficult on linux because it requires synchronizing the change
between all threads, which have their own thread-local credentials on
the kernel side. this is further complicated by the fact that changing
the real uid can fail due to exceeding RLIMIT_NPROC, making it
possible that the syscall will succeed in some threads but fail in
others.
the old __rsyscall approach being replaced was robust in that it would
report failure if any one thread failed, but in this case, the program
would be left in an inconsistent state where individual threads might
have different uid. (this was not as bad as glibc, which would
sometimes even fail to report the failure entirely!)
the new approach being committed refuses to change real user id when
it cannot temporarily set the rlimit to infinity. this is completely
POSIX conformant since POSIX does not require an implementation to
allow real-user-id changes for non-privileged processes whatsoever.
still, setting the real uid can fail due to memory allocation in the
kernel, but this can only happen if there is not already a cached
object for the target user. thus, we forcibly serialize the syscalls
attempts, and fail the entire operation on the first failure. this
*should* lead to an all-or-nothing success/failure result, but it's
still fragile and highly dependent on kernel developers not breaking
things worse than they're already broken.
ideally linux will eventually add a CLONE_USERCRED flag that would
give POSIX conformant credential changes without any hacks from
userspace, and all of this code would become redundant and could be
removed ~10 years down the line when everyone has abandoned the old
broken kernels. i'm not holding my breath...
