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  1. Sep 27, 2007
    • rsc's avatar
      · c8919e65
      rsc authored
      kernel SMP interruptibility fixes.
      
      Last year, right before I sent xv6 to the printer, I changed the
      SETGATE calls so that interrupts would be disabled on entry to
      interrupt handlers, and I added the nlock++ / nlock-- in trap()
      so that interrupts would stay disabled while the hw handlers
      (but not the syscall handler) did their work.  I did this because
      the kernel was otherwise causing Bochs to triple-fault in SMP
      mode, and time was short.
      
      Robert observed yesterday that something was keeping the SMP
      preemption user test from working.  It turned out that when I
      simplified the lapic code I swapped the order of two register
      writes that I didn't realize were order dependent.  I fixed that
      and then since I had everything paged in kept going and tried
      to figure out why you can't leave interrupts on during interrupt
      handlers.  There are a few issues.
      
      First, there must be some way to keep interrupts from "stacking
      up" and overflowing the stack.  Keeping interrupts off the whole
      time solves this problem -- even if the clock tick handler runs
      long enough that the next clock tick is waiting when it finishes,
      keeping interrupts off means that the handler runs all the way
      through the "iret" before the next handler begins.  This is not
      really a problem unless you are putting too many prints in trap
      -- if the OS is doing its job right, the handlers should run
      quickly and not stack up.
      
      Second, if xv6 had page faults, then it would be important to
      keep interrupts disabled between the start of the interrupt and
      the time that cr2 was read, to avoid a scenario like:
      
         p1 page faults [cr2 set to faulting address]
         p1 starts executing trapasm.S
         clock interrupt, p1 preempted, p2 starts executing
         p2 page faults [cr2 set to another faulting address]
         p2 starts, finishes fault handler
         p1 rescheduled, reads cr2, sees wrong fault address
      
      Alternately p1 could be rescheduled on the other cpu, in which
      case it would still see the wrong cr2.  That said, I think cr2
      is the only interrupt state that isn't pushed onto the interrupt
      stack atomically at fault time, and xv6 doesn't care.  (This isn't
      entirely hypothetical -- I debugged this problem on Plan 9.)
      
      Third, and this is the big one, it is not safe to call cpu()
      unless interrupts are disabled.  If interrupts are enabled then
      there is no guarantee that, between the time cpu() looks up the
      cpu id and the time that it the result gets used, the process
      has not been rescheduled to the other cpu.  For example, the
      very commonly-used expression curproc[cpu()] (aka the macro cp)
      can end up referring to the wrong proc: the code stores the
      result of cpu() in %eax, gets rescheduled to the other cpu at
      just the wrong instant, and then reads curproc[%eax].
      
      We use curproc[cpu()] to get the current process a LOT.  In that
      particular case, if we arranged for the current curproc entry
      to be addressed by %fs:0 and just use a different %fs on each
      CPU, then we could safely get at curproc even with interrupts
      disabled, since the read of %fs would be atomic with the read
      of %fs:0.  Alternately, we could have a curproc() function that
      disables interrupts while computing curproc[cpu()].  I've done
      that last one.
      
      Even in the current kernel, with interrupts off on entry to trap,
      interrupts are enabled inside release if there are no locks held.
      Also, the scheduler's idle loop must be interruptible at times
      so that the clock and disk interrupts (which might make processes
      runnable) can be handled.
      
      In addition to the rampant use of curproc[cpu()], this little
      snippet from acquire is wrong on smp:
      
        if(cpus[cpu()].nlock == 0)
          cli();
        cpus[cpu()].nlock++;
      
      because if interrupts are off then we might call cpu(), get
      rescheduled to a different cpu, look at cpus[oldcpu].nlock, and
      wrongly decide not to disable interrupts on the new cpu.  The
      fix is to always call cli().  But this is wrong too:
      
        if(holding(lock))
          panic("acquire");
        cli();
        cpus[cpu()].nlock++;
      
      because holding looks at cpu().  The fix is:
      
        cli();
        if(holding(lock))
          panic("acquire");
        cpus[cpu()].nlock++;
      
      I've done that, and I changed cpu() to complain the first time
      it gets called with interrupts disabled.  (It gets called too
      much to complain every time.)
      
      I added new functions splhi and spllo that are like acquire and
      release but without the locking:
      
        void
        splhi(void)
        {
          cli();
          cpus[cpu()].nsplhi++;
        }
      
        void
        spllo(void)
        {
          if(--cpus[cpu()].nsplhi == 0)
            sti();
        }
      
      and I've used those to protect other sections of code that refer
      to cpu() when interrupts would otherwise be disabled (basically
      just curproc and setupsegs).  I also use them in acquire/release
      and got rid of nlock.
      
      I'm not thrilled with the names, but I think the concept -- a
      counted cli/sti -- is sound.  Having them also replaces the
      nlock++/nlock-- in trap.c and main.c, which is nice.
      
      
      Final note: it's still not safe to enable interrupts in
      the middle of trap() between lapic_eoi and returning
      to user space.  I don't understand why, but we get a
      fault on pop %es because 0x10 is a bad segment
      descriptor (!) and then the fault faults trying to go into
      a new interrupt because 0x8 is a bad segment descriptor too!
      Triple fault.  I haven't debugged this yet.
      c8919e65
  2. Aug 28, 2007
  3. Aug 24, 2007
  4. Aug 23, 2007
    • rsc's avatar
      · b1fb19b6
      rsc authored
      Use parent pointer instead of ppid.
      b1fb19b6
  5. Aug 21, 2007
    • rsc's avatar
      · eaea18cb
      rsc authored
      PDF at http://am.lcs.mit.edu/~rsc/xv6.pdf
      
      Various changes made while offline.
      
       + bwrite sector argument is redundant; use b->sector.
       + reformatting of files for nicer PDF page breaks
       + distinguish between locked, unlocked inodes in type signatures
       + change FD_FILE to FD_INODE
       + move userinit (nee proc0init) to proc.c
       + move ROOTDEV to param.h
       + always parenthesize sizeof argument
      eaea18cb
  6. Aug 10, 2007
  7. Aug 08, 2007
  8. Sep 07, 2006
  9. Sep 06, 2006
  10. Aug 29, 2006
  11. Aug 15, 2006
  12. Aug 10, 2006
  13. Aug 08, 2006
    • rtm's avatar
      fix race in holding() check in acquire() · 0e84a0ec
      rtm authored
      give cpu1 a TSS and gdt for when it enters scheduler()
      and a pseudo proc[] entry for each cpu
      cpu0 waits for each other cpu to start up
      read() for files
      0e84a0ec
  14. Jul 29, 2006
    • rtm's avatar
      open() · 32630628
      rtm authored
      32630628
  15. Jul 20, 2006
  16. Jul 16, 2006
  17. Jul 15, 2006
    • rsc's avatar
      · 65bd8e13
      rsc authored
      New scheduler.
      
      Removed cli and sti stack in favor of tracking
      number of locks held on each CPU and explicit
      conditionals in spinlock.c.
      65bd8e13
    • rtm's avatar
      no more recursive locks · 46bbd72f
      rtm authored
      wakeup1() assumes you hold proc_table_lock
      sleep(chan, lock) provides atomic sleep-and-release to wait for condition
      ugly code in swtch/scheduler to implement new sleep
      fix lots of bugs in pipes, wait, and exit
      fix bugs if timer interrupt goes off in schedule()
      console locks per line, not per byte
      46bbd72f
  18. Jul 12, 2006
    • rtm's avatar
      passes both usertests · 6eb6f10c
      rtm authored
      exit had acquire where I meant release
      swtch now checks that you hold no locks
      6eb6f10c
    • rtm's avatar
      i think my cmpxchg use was wrong in acquire · 8148b6ee
      rtm authored
      nesting cli/sti: release shouldn't always enable interrupts
      separate setup of lapic from starting of other cpus, so cpu() works earlier
      flag to disable locking in console output
      make locks work even when curproc==0
      (still crashes in clock interrupt)
      8148b6ee
  19. Jul 11, 2006
  20. Jul 10, 2006
    • rsc's avatar
      Changes to allow use of native x86 ELF compilers, which on my · 5ce9751c
      rsc authored
      Linux 2.4 box using gcc 3.4.6 don't seem to follow the same
      conventions as the i386-jos-elf-gcc compilers.
      Can run make 'TOOLPREFIX=' or edit the Makefile.
      
      curproc[cpu()] can now be NULL, indicating that no proc is running.
      This seemed safer to me than having curproc[0] and curproc[1]
      both pointing at proc[0] potentially.
      
      The old implementation of swtch depended on the stack frame layout
      used inside swtch being okay to return from on the other stack
      (exactly the V6 you are not expected to understand this).
      It also could be called in two contexts: at boot time, to schedule
      the very first process, and later, on behalf of a process, to sleep
      or schedule some other process.
      
      I split this into two functions: scheduler and swtch.
      
      The scheduler is now a separate never-returning function, invoked
      by each cpu once set up.  The scheduler looks like:
      
      	scheduler() {
      		setjmp(cpu.context);
      
      		pick proc to schedule
      		blah blah blah
      
      		longjmp(proc.context)
      	}
      
      The new swtch is intended to be called only when curproc[cpu()] is not NULL,
      that is, only on behalf of a user proc.  It does:
      
      	swtch() {
      		if(setjmp(proc.context) == 0)
      			longjmp(cpu.context)
      	}
      
      to save the current proc context and then jump over to the scheduler,
      running on the cpu stack.
      
      Similarly the system call stubs are now in assembly in usys.S to avoid
      needing to know the details of stack frame layout used by the compiler.
      
      Also various changes in the debugging prints.
      5ce9751c
  21. Jul 05, 2006
  22. Jul 01, 2006
    • rtm's avatar
      swtch saves callee-saved registers · 8b4e2a08
      rtm authored
      swtch idles on per-CPU stack, not on calling process's stack
      fix pipe bugs
      usertest.c tests pipes, fork, exit, close
      8b4e2a08
  23. Jun 27, 2006
  24. Jun 22, 2006
  25. Jun 15, 2006
  26. Jun 12, 2006
    • rtm's avatar
      import · 55e95b16
      rtm authored
      55e95b16
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