Re: [PATCH] Futex Generalization Patch

Peter Wächtler (pwaechtler@loewe-komp.de)
Fri, 12 Apr 2002 17:36:28 +0200


Hubertus Franke wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 10 April 2002 03:30 pm, Bill Abt wrote:
> > On 04/10/2002 at 02:10:59 PM AST, Hubertus Franke <frankeh@watson.ibm.com>
> >
> > wrote:
> > > So you are OK with having only poll or select. That seems odd.
> > > It seems you still need SIGIO on your fd to get the async notification.
> >
> > Duh... You're right. I forgot about that...
> >
>
> Yes,
>
> The current interface is
>
> (A)
> async wait:
> sys_futex (uaddr, FUTEX_AWAIT, value, (struct timespec*) sig);
> upon signal handling
> sys_futex(uaddrs[], FUTEX_WAIT, size, NULL);
> to retrieve the uaddrs that got woken up...
>
> If you simply want a notification with SIGIO (or whatever you desire)
> We can change that to
> (A)
> sys_futex(uaddr, FUTEX_WAIT, value, (truct timespec*) fd);
>
> I send a SIGIO and you can request via ioctl or read the pending
> notifications from fd.
> (B) { struct futex *notarray[N]
> int n = read( futex_fd, (void**)notarray,
> N*sizeof(struct futex));
> }
> I am mainly concerned that SIGIO can be overloaded in a thread package ?
> How would you know whether a SIGIO came from the futex or from other file
> handle.
>

I want to vote for using POSIX realtime signals. With them (and SA_SIGINFO)
you can carry small amounts of userdata, passed in the

struct siginfo_t
---susv2---
The <signal.h> header defines the siginfo_t type as a structure that
includes at least the following members:

int si_signo signal number
int si_errno if non-zero, an errno value associated with
this signal, as defined in <errno.h>
int si_code signal code
pid_t si_pid sending process ID
uid_t si_uid real user ID of sending process
void *si_addr address of faulting instruction
int si_status exit value or signal
long si_band band event for SIGPOLL
union sigval si_value signal value

[and further on]
Implementations may support additional si_code values not included in this
list, may generate values included in this list under circumstances other
than those described in this list, and may contain extensions or limitations
that prevent some values from being generated. Implementations will not
generate a different value from the ones described in this list for
circumstances described in this list.

---susv2---

So we could use si_code=SI_QUEUE and pass the uaddr in sival_ptr
or even si_code=SIGPOLL and pass the data in si_band.

We could also add our own si_code (SI_FUTEX) and add the tid in
siginfo_t (if needed for NGPT)

Why pass this data over a file descriptor?
The user space library can block on sigtimedwait() for notifications.

And with the DoS (letting the kernel pin too much memory on behalf
of a user process) we could use the "max locked memory" ulimit.
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