In order to resolve page faults on file-mapped pages, VM may need to
communicate (through VFS) with a file system. The file system must
therefore not be the one to cause, and thus end up being blocked on,
such page faults. To resolve this potential deadlock, the safecopy
system was previously extended with the CPF_TRY flag, which causes the
kernel to return EFAULT to the caller of a safecopy function upon
getting a pagefault, bypassing VM and thus avoiding the loop. VFS was
extended to repeat relevant file system calls that returned EFAULT,
after resolving the page fault, to keep these soft faults from being
exposed to applications.
However, general UNIX I/O semantics dictate that if an I/O transfer
partially succeeded before running into a failure, the partial result
is to be returned. Proper file system implementations may therefore
end up returning partial success rather than the EFAULT code resulting
from a soft fault. Since VFS does not get the EFAULT code in this
case, it does not know that a soft fault occurred, and thus does not
repeat the call either. The end result is that an application may get
partial I/O results (e.g., a short read(2)) even on regular files.
Applications cannot reasonably be expected to deal with this.
Due to the fact that most of the current file system implementations
do not implement proper partial-failure semantics, this problem is not
yet widespread. In fact, it has only occurred on direct block device
I/O so far. However, the next generation of file system services will
be implementing proper I/O semantics, thus exacerbating the problem.
To remedy this situation, this patch changes the CPF_TRY semantics:
whenever the kernel experiences a soft fault during a safecopy call,
in addition to returning FAULT, the kernel also stores a mark in the
grant created with CPF_TRY. Instead of testing on EFAULT, VFS checks
whether the grant was marked, as part of revoking the grant. If the
grant was indeed marked by the kernel, VFS repeats the file system
operation, regardless of its initial return value. Thus, the EFAULT
code now only serves to make the file system fail the call faster.
The approach is currently supported for both direct and magic grants,
but is used only with magic grants - arguably the only case where it
makes sense. Indirect grants should not have CPF_TRY set; in a chain
of indirect grants, the original grant is marked, as it should be.
In order to avoid potential SMP issues, the mark stored in the grant
is its grant identifier, so as to discard outdated kernel writes.
Whether this is necessary or effective remains to be evaluated.
This patch also cleans up the grant structure a bit, removing reserved
space and thus making the structure slightly smaller. The structure
is used internally between system services only, so there is no need
for binary compatibility.
Change-Id: I6bb3990dce67a80146d954546075ceda4d6567f8
Changed all K&R style functions to ANSI-style declarations within the
kernel directory. The code compiles and aparently works for i386. For
arm my toolchain does not work, but I have changed the code with great
care. Also, the make command fails for the test suite. Therefore, I
strongly recommand to review the code with care.
Edited by David van Moolenbroek to convert really all K&R functions.
Change-Id: I58cde797d36f4caa9c72db4e4dc27d8545ab8866
This functionality is required for BSD top(1), as exposed through
the CTL_KERN KERN_CP_TIME sysctl(2) call. The idea is that the
overall time spent in the system is divided into five categories.
While NetBSD uses a separate category for the kernel ("system") and
interrupts, we redefine "system" to mean userspace system services
and "interrupts" to mean time spent in the kernel, thereby providing
the same categories as MINIX3's own top(1), while adding the "nice"
category which, like on NetBSD, is used for time spent by processes
with a priority lowered by the system administrator.
Change-Id: I2114148d1e07d9635055ceca7b163f337c53c43a
The current value was both wrong (counting spawned kernel signals
rather than delivered user signals) and returned for the calling
process even if the request was for the process's children.
For now we are better off not populating this field at all.
Change-Id: I6c660be266b5746b7c3db57ae88fa7f872961ee2
Please note that this information is for use by system services only!
The clock facility is not ready to be used directly by userland, and
thus, this kernel page extension is NOT part of the userland ABI.
For service programmers' convenience, change the prototype of the
getticks(3) to return the uptime clock value directly, since the call
can no longer fail.
Correct the sys_times(2) reply message to use the right field type
for the boot time.
Restructure the kernel internals a bit so as to have all the clock
stuff closer together.
Change-Id: Ifc050b7bd253aecbe46e3bd7d7cc75bd86e45555
The filtering also exposed the risk that a process be killed or
swapped while on the list of VM memory requests. These cases are
now handled properly as well.
Change-Id: Ibd3897b34abdf33bce19d37b8e5f65fbd0fd9316
. make arch-independent, and local to proc.c, reduce code duplication
. make vm_suspend public but unduplicated in proc.c
. ask VM for handling once, 2nd time SIGSEGV process
. remove debug printfs
. test case for bogus sendrec() address argument
Change-Id: I3893758910c01de60b8fe3e50edd594296a0b73e
