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2015-04-11remove mismatched arguments from vmlock function definitionsRich Felker1-2/+2
commit f08ab9e61a147630497198fe3239149275c0a3f4 introduced these accidentally as remnants of some work I tried that did not work out.
2015-04-10redesign and simplify vmlock systemRich Felker1-12/+11
this global lock allows certain unlock-type primitives to exclude mmap/munmap operations which could change the identity of virtual addresses while references to them still exist. the original design mistakenly assumed mmap/munmap would conversely need to exclude the same operations which exclude mmap/munmap, so the vmlock was implemented as a sort of 'symmetric recursive rwlock'. this turned out to be unnecessary. commit 25d12fc0fc51f1fae0f85b4649a6463eb805aa8f already shortened the interval during which mmap/munmap held their side of the lock, but left the inappropriate lock design and some inefficiency. the new design uses a separate function, __vm_wait, which does not hold any lock itself and only waits for lock users which were already present when it was called to release the lock. this is sufficient because of the way operations that need to be excluded are sequenced: the "unlock-type" operations using the vmlock need only block mmap/munmap operations that are precipitated by (and thus sequenced after) the atomic-unlock they perform while holding the vmlock. this allows for a spectacular lack of synchronization in the __vm_wait function itself.
2015-03-03make all objects used with atomic operations volatileRich Felker1-1/+1
the memory model we use internally for atomics permits plain loads of values which may be subject to concurrent modification without requiring that a special load function be used. since a compiler is free to make transformations that alter the number of loads or the way in which loads are performed, the compiler is theoretically free to break this usage. the most obvious concern is with atomic cas constructs: something of the form tmp=*p;a_cas(p,tmp,f(tmp)); could be transformed to a_cas(p,*p,f(*p)); where the latter is intended to show multiple loads of *p whose resulting values might fail to be equal; this would break the atomicity of the whole operation. but even more fundamental breakage is possible. with the changes being made now, objects that may be modified by atomics are modeled as volatile, and the atomic operations performed on them by other threads are modeled as asynchronous stores by hardware which happens to be acting on the request of another thread. such modeling of course does not itself address memory synchronization between cores/cpus, but that aspect was already handled. this all seems less than ideal, but it's the best we can do without mandating a C11 compiler and using the C11 model for atomics. in the case of pthread_once_t, the ABI type of the underlying object is not volatile-qualified. so we are assuming that accessing the object through a volatile-qualified lvalue via casts yields volatile access semantics. the language of the C standard is somewhat unclear on this matter, but this is an assumption the linux kernel also makes, and seems to be the correct interpretation of the standard.
2012-08-17fix extremely rare but dangerous race condition in robust mutexesRich Felker1-0/+22
if new shared mappings of files/devices/shared memory can be made between the time a robust mutex is unlocked and its subsequent removal from the pending slot in the robustlist header, the kernel can inadvertently corrupt data in the newly-mapped pages when the process terminates. i am fixing the bug by using the same global vm lock mechanism that was used to fix the race condition with unmapping barriers after pthread_barrier_wait returns.