History log of /seL4-camkes-master/projects/musllibc/src/thread/pthread_attr_setstack.c
Revision Date Author Comments
# 33ce9208 07-Nov-2016 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

simplify pthread_attr_t stack/guard size representation

previously, the pthread_attr_t object was always initialized all-zero,
and stack/guard size were represented as differences versus their
defaults. this required lots of confusing offset arithmetic everywhere
they were used. instead, have pthread_attr_init fill in the default
values, and work with absolute sizes everywhere.


# d5142642 01-Feb-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

pthread stack treatment overhaul for application-provided stacks, etc.

the main goal of these changes is to address the case where an
application provides a stack of size N, but TLS has size M that's a
significant portion of the size N (or even larger than N), thus giving
the application less stack space than it expected or no stack at all!

the new strategy pthread_create now uses is to only put TLS on the
application-provided stack if TLS is smaller than 1/8 of the stack
size or 2k, whichever is smaller. this ensures that the application
always has "close enough" to what it requested, and the threshold is
chosen heuristically to make sure "sane" amounts of TLS still end up
in the application-provided stack.

if TLS does not fit the above criteria, pthread_create uses mmap to
obtain space for TLS, but still uses the application-provided stack
for actual call frame stack. this is to avoid wasting memory, and for
the sake of supporting ugly hacks like garbage collection based on
assumptions that the implementation will use the provided stack range.

in order for the above heuristics to ever succeed, the amount of TLS
space wasted on POSIX TSD (pthread_key_create based) needed to be
reduced. otherwise, these changes would preclude any use of
pthread_create without mmap, which would have serious memory usage and
performance costs for applications trying to create huge numbers of
threads using pre-allocated stack space. the new value of
PTHREAD_KEYS_MAX is the minimum allowed by POSIX, 128. this should
still be plenty more than real-world applications need, especially now
that C11/gcc-style TLS is now supported in musl, and most apps and
libraries choose to use that instead of POSIX TSD when available.

at the same time, PTHREAD_STACK_MIN has been decreased. it was
originally set to PAGE_SIZE back when there was no support for TLS or
application-provided stacks, and requests smaller than a whole page
did not make sense. now, there are two good reasons to support
requests smaller than a page: (1) applications could provide
pre-allocated stacks smaller than a page, and (2) with smaller stack
sizes, stack+TLS+TSD can all fit in one page, making it possible for
applications which need huge numbers of threads with minimal stack
needs to allocate exactly one page per thread. the new value of
PTHREAD_STACK_MIN, 2k, is aligned with the minimum size for
sigaltstack.


# 819006a8 09-Jun-2012 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

add pthread_attr_setstack interface (and get)

i originally omitted these (optional, per POSIX) interfaces because i
considered them backwards implementation details. however, someone
later brought to my attention a fairly legitimate use case: allocating
thread stacks in memory that's setup for sharing and/or fast transfer
between CPU and GPU so that the thread can move data to a GPU directly
from automatic-storage buffers without having to go through additional
buffer copies.

perhaps there are other situations in which these interfaces are
useful too.