- IPC_FLG_MSG_FROM_KERNEL status flag is returned to userspace if the
receive was satisfied by s message which was sent by the kernel on
behalf of a process. This perfectly reliale information.
- MF_SENDING_FROM_KERNEL flag added to processes to be able to set
IPC_FLG_MSG_FROM_KERNEL when finishing receive if the receiver
wasn't ready to receive immediately.
- PM is changed to use this information to confirm that the scheduling
messages are indeed from the kernel and not faked by a process.
PM uses sef_receive_status()
- get_work() is removed from PM to make the changes simpler
- cotributed by Bjorn Swift
- In this first phase, scheduling is moved from the kernel to the PM
server. The next steps are to a) moving scheduling to its own server
and b) include useful information in the "out of quantum" message,
so that the scheduler can make use of this information.
- The kernel process table now keeps record of who is responsible for
scheduling each process (p_scheduler). When this pointer is NULL,
the process will be scheduled by the kernel. If such a process runs
out of quantum, the kernel will simply renew its quantum an requeue
it.
- When PM loads, it will take over scheduling of all running
processes, except system processes, using sys_schedctl().
Essentially, this only results in taking over init. As children
inherit a scheduler from their parent, user space programs forked by
init will inherit PM (for now) as their scheduler.
- Once a process has been assigned a scheduler, and runs out of
quantum, its RTS_NO_QUANTUM flag will be set and the process
dequeued. The kernel will send a message to the scheduler, on the
process' behalf, informing the scheduler that it has run out of
quantum. The scheduler can take what ever action it pleases, based
on its policy, and then reschedule the process using the
sys_schedule() system call.
- Balance queues does not work as before. While the old in-kernel
function used to renew the quantum of processes in the highest
priority run queue, the user-space implementation only acts on
processes that have been bumped down to a lower priority queue.
This approach reacts slower to changes than the old one, but saves
us sending a sys_schedule message for each process every time we
balance the queues. Currently, when processes are moved up a
priority queue, their quantum is also renewed, but this can be
fiddled with.
- do_nice has been removed from kernel. PM answers to get- and
setpriority calls, updates it's own nice variable as well as the
max_run_queue. This will be refactored once scheduling is moved to a
separate server. We will probably have PM update it's local nice
value and then send a message to whoever is scheduling the process.
- changes to fix an issue in do_fork() where processes could run out
of quantum but bypassing the code path that handles it correctly.
The future plan is to remove the policy from do_fork() and implement
it in userspace too.
UPDATING INFO:
20100317:
/usr/src/etc/system.conf updated to ignore default kernel calls: copy
it (or merge it) to /etc/system.conf.
The hello driver (/dev/hello) added to the distribution:
# cd /usr/src/commands/scripts && make clean install
# cd /dev && MAKEDEV hello
KERNEL CHANGES:
- Generic signal handling support. The kernel no longer assumes PM as a signal
manager for every process. The signal manager of a given process can now be
specified in its privilege slot. When a signal has to be delivered, the kernel
performs the lookup and forwards the signal to the appropriate signal manager.
PM is the default signal manager for user processes, RS is the default signal
manager for system processes. To enable ptrace()ing for system processes, it
is sufficient to change the default signal manager to PM. This will temporarily
disable crash recovery, though.
- sys_exit() is now split into sys_exit() (i.e. exit() for system processes,
which generates a self-termination signal), and sys_clear() (i.e. used by PM
to ask the kernel to clear a process slot when a process exits).
- Added a new kernel call (i.e. sys_update()) to swap two process slots and
implement live update.
PM CHANGES:
- Posix signal handling is no longer allowed for system processes. System
signals are split into two fixed categories: termination and non-termination
signals. When a non-termination signaled is processed, PM transforms the signal
into an IPC message and delivers the message to the system process. When a
termination signal is processed, PM terminates the process.
- PM no longer assumes itself as the signal manager for system processes. It now
makes sure that every system signal goes through the kernel before being
actually processes. The kernel will then dispatch the signal to the appropriate
signal manager which may or may not be PM.
SYSLIB CHANGES:
- Simplified SEF init and LU callbacks.
- Added additional predefined SEF callbacks to debug crash recovery and
live update.
- Fixed a temporary ack in the SEF init protocol. SEF init reply is now
completely synchronous.
- Added SEF signal event type to provide a uniform interface for system
processes to deal with signals. A sef_cb_signal_handler() callback is
available for system processes to handle every received signal. A
sef_cb_signal_manager() callback is used by signal managers to process
system signals on behalf of the kernel.
- Fixed a few bugs with memory mapping and DS.
VM CHANGES:
- Page faults and memory requests coming from the kernel are now implemented
using signals.
- Added a new VM call to swap two process slots and implement live update.
- The call is used by RS at update time and in turn invokes the kernel call
sys_update().
RS CHANGES:
- RS has been reworked with a better functional decomposition.
- Better kernel call masks. com.h now defines the set of very basic kernel calls
every system service is allowed to use. This makes system.conf simpler and
easier to maintain. In addition, this guarantees a higher level of isolation
for system libraries that use one or more kernel calls internally (e.g. printf).
- RS is the default signal manager for system processes. By default, RS
intercepts every signal delivered to every system process. This makes crash
recovery possible before bringing PM and friends in the loop.
- RS now supports fast rollback when something goes wrong while initializing
the new version during a live update.
- Live update is now implemented by keeping the two versions side-by-side and
swapping the process slots when the old version is ready to update.
- Crash recovery is now implemented by keeping the two versions side-by-side
and cleaning up the old version only when the recovery process is complete.
DS CHANGES:
- Fixed a bug when the process doing ds_publish() or ds_delete() is not known
by DS.
- Fixed the completely broken support for strings. String publishing is now
implemented in the system library and simply wraps publishing of memory ranges.
Ideally, we should adopt a similar approach for other data types as well.
- Test suite fixed.
DRIVER CHANGES:
- The hello driver has been added to the Minix distribution to demonstrate basic
live update and crash recovery functionalities.
- Other drivers have been adapted to conform the new SEF interface.
swapcontext, and makecontext).
- Fix VM to not erroneously think the stack segment and data segment have
collided when a user-space thread invokes brk().
- Add test51 to test ucontext functionality.
- Add man pages for ucontext system calls.
Move archtypes.h to include/ dir, since several servers require it. Move
fpu.h and stackframe.h to arch-specific header directory. Make source
files and makefiles aware of the new header locations.
this change
- makes panic() variadic, doing full printf() formatting -
no more NO_NUM, and no more separate printf() statements
needed to print extra info (or something in hex) before panicing
- unifies panic() - same panic() name and usage for everyone -
vm, kernel and rest have different names/syntax currently
in order to implement their own luxuries, but no longer
- throws out the 1st argument, to make source less noisy.
the panic() in syslib retrieves the server name from the kernel
so it should be clear enough who is panicing; e.g.
panic("sigaction failed: %d", errno);
looks like:
at_wini(73130): panic: sigaction failed: 0
syslib:panic.c: stacktrace: 0x74dc 0x2025 0x100a
- throws out report() - printf() is more convenient and powerful
- harmonizes/fixes the use of panic() - there were a few places
that used printf-style formatting (didn't work) and newlines
(messes up the formatting) in panic()
- throws out a few per-server panic() functions
- cleans up a tie-in of tty with panic()
merging printf() and panic() statements to be done incrementally.
- PM: get rid of umap warning
- sprofalyze.pl: update with recently added servers and drivers
- sprofalyze.pl: properly truncate process names for sample matching
SYSLIB CHANGES:
- SEF framework now supports a new SEF Init request type from RS. 3 different
callbacks are available (init_fresh, init_lu, init_restart) to specify
initialization code when a service starts fresh, starts after a live update,
or restarts.
SYSTEM SERVICE CHANGES:
- Initialization code for system services is now enclosed in a callback SEF will
automatically call at init time. The return code of the callback will
tell RS whether the initialization completed successfully.
- Each init callback can access information passed by RS to initialize. As of
now, each system service has access to the public entries of RS's system process
table to gather all the information required to initialize. This design
eliminates many existing or potential races at boot time and provides a uniform
initialization interface to system services. The same interface will be reused
for the upcoming publish/subscribe model to handle dynamic
registration / deregistration of system services.
VM CHANGES:
- Uniform privilege management for all system services. Every service uses the
same call mask format. For boot services, VM copies the call mask from init
data. For dynamic services, VM still receives the call mask via rs_set_priv
call that will be soon replaced by the upcoming publish/subscribe model.
RS CHANGES:
- The system process table has been reorganized and split into private entries
and public entries. Only the latter ones are exposed to system services.
- VM call masks are now entirely configured in rs/table.c
- RS has now its own slot in the system process table. Only kernel tasks and
user processes not included in the boot image are now left out from the system
process table.
- RS implements the initialization protocol for system services.
- For services in the boot image, RS blocks till initialization is complete and
panics when failure is reported back. Services are initialized in their order of
appearance in the boot image priv table and RS blocks to implements synchronous
initialization for every system service having the flag SF_SYNCH_BOOT set.
- For services started dynamically, the initialization protocol is implemented
as though it were the first ping for the service. In this case, if the
system service fails to report back (or reports failure), RS brings the service
down rather than trying to restart it.
- clean up kernel section of minix/com.h somewhat
- remove ALLOCMEM and VM_ALLOCMEM calls
- remove non-safecopy and minix-vmd support from Inet
- remove SYS_VIRVCOPY and SYS_PHYSVCOPY calls
- remove obsolete segment encoding in SYS_SAFECOPY*
- remove DEVCTL call, svrctl(FSDEVUNMAP), map_driverX
- remove declarations of unimplemented svrctl requests
- remove everything related to swapping to disk
- remove floppysetup.sh
- remove traces of rescue device
- update DESCRIBE.sh with new devices
- some other small changes
SYSLIB CHANGES:
- SEF must be used by every system process and is thereby part of the system
library.
- The framework provides a receive() interface (sef_receive) for system
processes to automatically catch known system even messages and process them.
- SEF provides a default behavior for each type of system event, but allows
system processes to register callbacks to override the default behavior.
- Custom (local to the process) or predefined (provided by SEF) callback
implementations can be registered to SEF.
- SEF currently includes support for 2 types of system events:
1. SEF Ping. The event occurs every time RS sends a ping to figure out
whether a system process is still alive. The default callback implementation
provided by SEF is to notify RS back to let it know the process is alive
and kicking.
2. SEF Live update. The event occurs every time RS sends a prepare to update
message to let a system process know an update is available and to prepare
for it. The live update support is very basic for now. SEF only deals with
verifying if the prepare state can be supported by the process, dumping the
state for debugging purposes, and providing an event-driven programming
model to the process to react to state changes check-in when ready to update.
- SEF should be extended in the future to integrate support for more types of
system events. Ideally, all the cross-cutting concerns should be integrated into
SEF to avoid duplicating code and ease extensibility. Examples include:
* PM notify messages primarily used at shutdown.
* SYSTEM notify messages primarily used for signals.
* CLOCK notify messages used for system alarms.
* Debug messages. IS could still be in charge of fkey handling but would
forward the debug message to the target process (e.g. PM, if the user
requested debug information about PM). SEF would then catch the message and
do nothing unless the process has registered an appropriate callback to
deal with the event. This simplifies the programming model to print debug
information, avoids duplicating code, and reduces the effort to print
debug information.
SYSTEM PROCESSES CHANGES:
- Every system process registers SEF callbacks it needs to override the default
system behavior and calls sef_startup() right after being started.
- sef_startup() does almost nothing now, but will be extended in the future to
support callbacks of its own to let RS control and synchronize with every
system process at initialization time.
- Every system process calls sef_receive() now rather than receive() directly,
to let SEF handle predefined system events.
RS CHANGES:
- RS supports a basic single-component live update protocol now, as follows:
* When an update command is issued (via "service update *"), RS notifies the
target system process to prepare for a specific update state.
* If the process doesn't respond back in time, the update is aborted.
* When the process responds back, RS kills it and marks it for refreshing.
* The process is then automatically restarted as for a buggy process and can
start running again.
* Live update is currently prototyped as a controlled failure.
- Revise VFS-FS protocol and update VFS/MFS/ISOFS accordingly.
- Clean up MFS by removing old, dead code (backwards compatibility is broken by
the new VFS-FS protocol, anyway) and rewrite other parts. Also, make sure all
functions have proper banners and prototypes.
- VFS should always provide a (syntactically) valid path to the FS; no need for
the FS to do sanity checks when leaving/entering mount points.
- Fix several bugs in MFS:
- Several path lookup bugs in MFS.
- A link can be too big for the path buffer.
- A mountpoint can become inaccessible when the creation of a new inode
fails, because the inode already exists and is a mountpoint.
- Introduce support for supplemental groups.
- Add test 46 to test supplemental group functionality (and removed obsolete
suppl. tests from test 2).
- Clean up VFS (not everything is done yet).
- ISOFS now opens device read-only. This makes the -r flag in the mount command
unnecessary (but will still report to be mounted read-write).
- Introduce PipeFS. PipeFS is a new FS that handles all anonymous and
named pipes. However, named pipes still reside on the (M)FS, as they are part
of the file system on disk. To make this work VFS now has a concept of
'mapped' inodes, which causes read, write, truncate and stat requests to be
redirected to the mapped FS, and all other requests to the original FS.
KERNEL CHANGES:
- The kernel only knows about privileges of kernel tasks and the root system
process (now RS).
- Kernel tasks and the root system process are the only processes that are made
schedulable by the kernel at startup. All the other processes in the boot image
don't get their privileges set at startup and are inhibited from running by the
RTS_NO_PRIV flag.
- Removed the assumption on the ordering of processes in the boot image table.
System processes can now appear in any order in the boot image table.
- Privilege ids can now be assigned both statically or dynamically. The kernel
assigns static privilege ids to kernel tasks and the root system process. Each
id is directly derived from the process number.
- User processes now all share the static privilege id of the root user
process (now INIT).
- sys_privctl split: we have more calls now to let RS set privileges for system
processes. SYS_PRIV_ALLOW / SYS_PRIV_DISALLOW are only used to flip the
RTS_NO_PRIV flag and allow / disallow a process from running. SYS_PRIV_SET_SYS /
SYS_PRIV_SET_USER are used to set privileges for a system / user process.
- boot image table flags split: PROC_FULLVM is the only flag that has been
moved out of the privilege flags and is still maintained in the boot image
table. All the other privilege flags are out of the kernel now.
RS CHANGES:
- RS is the only user-space process who gets to run right after in-kernel
startup.
- RS uses the boot image table from the kernel and three additional boot image
info table (priv table, sys table, dev table) to complete the initialization
of the system.
- RS checks that the entries in the priv table match the entries in the boot
image table to make sure that every process in the boot image gets schedulable.
- RS only uses static privilege ids to set privileges for system services in
the boot image.
- RS includes basic memory management support to allocate the boot image buffer
dynamically during initialization. The buffer shall contain the executable
image of all the system services we would like to restart after a crash.
- First step towards decoupling between resource provisioning and resource
requirements in RS: RS must know what resources it needs to restart a process
and what resources it has currently available. This is useful to tradeoff
reliability and resource consumption. When required resources are missing, the
process cannot be restarted. In that case, in the future, a system flag will
tell RS what to do. For example, if CORE_PROC is set, RS should trigger a
system-wide panic because the system can no longer function correctly without
a core system process.
PM CHANGES:
- The process tree built at initialization time is changed to have INIT as root
with pid 0, RS child of INIT and all the system services children of RS. This
is required to make RS in control of all the system services.
- PM no longer registers labels for system services in the boot image. This is
now part of RS's initialization process.
- allow PM to tell sys_runctl() whether to use delay call feature
- only use this feature in PM for delivering signals - not for exits
- do better error checking in PM on sys_runctl() calls
- rename SIGKREADY to SIGNDELAY
o Support for ptrace T_ATTACH/T_DETACH and T_SYSCALL
o PM signal handling logic should now work properly, even with debuggers
being present
o Asynchronous PM/VFS protocol, full IPC support for senda(), and
AMF_NOREPLY senda() flag
DETAILS
Process stop and delay call handling of PM:
o Added sys_runctl() kernel call with sys_stop() and sys_resume()
aliases, for PM to stop and resume a process
o Added exception for sending/syscall-traced processes to sys_runctl(),
and matching SIGKREADY pseudo-signal to PM
o Fixed PM signal logic to deal with requests from a process after
stopping it (so-called "delay calls"), using the SIGKREADY facility
o Fixed various PM panics due to race conditions with delay calls versus
VFS calls
o Removed special PRIO_STOP priority value
o Added SYS_LOCK RTS kernel flag, to stop an individual process from
running while modifying its process structure
Signal and debugger handling in PM:
o Fixed debugger signals being dropped if a second signal arrives when
the debugger has not retrieved the first one
o Fixed debugger signals being sent to the debugger more than once
o Fixed debugger signals unpausing process in VFS; removed PM_UNPAUSE_TR
protocol message
o Detached debugger signals from general signal logic and from being
blocked on VFS calls, meaning that even VFS can now be traced
o Fixed debugger being unable to receive more than one pending signal in
one process stop
o Fixed signal delivery being delayed needlessly when multiple signals
are pending
o Fixed wait test for tracer, which was returning for children that were
not waited for
o Removed second parallel pending call from PM to VFS for any process
o Fixed process becoming runnable between exec() and debugger trap
o Added support for notifying the debugger before the parent when a
debugged child exits
o Fixed debugger death causing child to remain stopped forever
o Fixed consistently incorrect use of _NSIG
Extensions to ptrace():
o Added T_ATTACH and T_DETACH ptrace request, to attach and detach a
debugger to and from a process
o Added T_SYSCALL ptrace request, to trace system calls
o Added T_SETOPT ptrace request, to set trace options
o Added TO_TRACEFORK trace option, to attach automatically to children
of a traced process
o Added TO_ALTEXEC trace option, to send SIGSTOP instead of SIGTRAP upon
a successful exec() of the tracee
o Extended T_GETUSER ptrace support to allow retrieving a process's priv
structure
o Removed T_STOP ptrace request again, as it does not help implementing
debuggers properly
o Added MINIX3-specific ptrace test (test42)
o Added proper manual page for ptrace(2)
Asynchronous PM/VFS interface:
o Fixed asynchronous messages not being checked when receive() is called
with an endpoint other than ANY
o Added AMF_NOREPLY senda() flag, preventing such messages from
satisfying the receive part of a sendrec()
o Added asynsend3() that takes optional flags; asynsend() is now a
#define passing in 0 as third parameter
o Made PM/VFS protocol asynchronous; reintroduced tell_fs()
o Made PM_BASE request/reply number range unique
o Hacked in a horrible temporary workaround into RS to deal with newly
revealed RS-PM-VFS race condition triangle until VFS is asynchronous
System signal handling:
o Fixed shutdown logic of device drivers; removed old SIGKSTOP signal
o Removed is-superuser check from PM's do_procstat() (aka getsigset())
o Added sigset macros to allow system processes to deal with the full
signal set, rather than just the POSIX subset
Miscellaneous PM fixes:
o Split do_getset into do_get and do_set, merging common code and making
structure clearer
o Fixed setpriority() being able to put to sleep processes using an
invalid parameter, or revive zombie processes
o Made find_proc() global; removed obsolete proc_from_pid()
o Cleanup here and there
Also included:
o Fixed false-positive boot order kernel warning
o Removed last traces of old NOTIFY_FROM code
THINGS OF POSSIBLE INTEREST
o It should now be possible to run PM at any priority, even lower than
user processes
o No assumptions are made about communication speed between PM and VFS,
although communication must be FIFO
o A debugger will now receive incoming debuggee signals at kill time
only; the process may not yet be fully stopped
o A first step has been made towards making the SYSTEM task preemptible
addr and taddr don't have to be defined any more, so that <sys/mman.h>
can be included for proper prototypes of munmap() and friends.
- rename our GETPID to MINIX_GETPID to avoid a name conflict with
other sources
- PM needs its own munmap() and munmap_text() to avoid sending messages
to VM at the startup phase. It *does* want to do that, but only
after initialising. So they're called again with unmap_ok set to 1
later.
- getnuid(), getngid() implementation
o Don't call vm_willexit() more than once upon normal process exit
o Correct two cases of indenting of the no-discussion-possible kind
o Perform slightly stricter ptrace(2) checks:
- process calling ptrace must be target process's parent
- process must call wait/waitpid before using ptrace on stopped child
- no ptrace on zombies
o Allow user processes to use ptrace(T_STOP) to stop an active child
