Some rough lab notes on these topics to record the current state of my knowledge. I’m not an expert, so there may be inaccuracies.
Mutexes
On Linux, libpthread mutexes are implemented using the underlying futex syscall
They are basically a combination of a spinlock (in userspace), backed by the kernel for wait/signal operations only when absolutely necessary (i.e. when there’s contention). In the common case of an uncontended lock acquire, there is no context switch which improves performance
The userspace spinlock portion uses atomics as spinlocks usually do, specifically because the compare and set must be atomic
Jeff Preshing (see below) writes that each OS/platform has an analogous concept to this kind of “lightweight” mutex — Windows and macOS have them too
Before futex(2), other syscalls were used for blocking. One option might have been the semaphore API, but commit 56c910668cff9131a365b98e9a91e636aace337a in glibc is before futex, and it seems like they actually use signals. (pthread_mutex_lock -> __pthread_lock (still has spinlock elements, despite being before futex) -> suspend() -> __pthread_suspend -> __pthread_wait_for_restart_signal -> sigsuspend)
A primary advantage of futex over previous implementations is that futexes only require kernel resources when there’s contention
Like atomics, mutexes implementations include memory barriers (maybe even implicitly due to atomics) to prevent loads/stores from inappropriately crossing the lock/unlock boundary due to compiler and/or hardware instruction reordering optimizations
It’s really all about memory. But to start at the beginning, the rough stack looks like this:
Userspace application
Kernel driver
Hardware device
I find it easier to think about this from the middle out. On Linux, the kernel exposes hardware devices as files backed by the /dev virtual filesystem. Userspace can do normal syscalls like open, read, write, and mmap on them, as well as the less typical ioctl (for more arbitrary, device-specific functionality).1.
The files are created by kernel drivers which are modules of kernel code whose sole purpose is to interface with and abstract hardware so it can be used by other parts of the operating system, or userspace. They are implemented implemented using internal driver “frameworks” in the kernel, e.g. the I2C or SPI frameworks. When you interface with a file in /dev, you are directly triggering callback handlers in a driver which execute in the process context.
That’s how userspace interfaces with the kernel. How do drivers interface with hardware? These days, mostly via memory mapped I/O (MMIO)2. This is when device hardware “appears” at certain physical addresses, and can be interfaced with via load and store instructions using an “API” that the device defines. For example, you can read data from a sensor by simply reading a physical address, or write data out to a device by writing to an address. The technical term for the hardware component these reads/writes interface with is “registers” (i.e. memory mapped registers).
(Aside: Other than MMIO, the other main interface the kernel has with hardware is interrupts, for interrupt driven I/O processing (as opposed to polling, which is what MMIO enables). I’m not very knowledgeable about this, so I won’t get into it other than to say drivers can register handlers for specific IRQ (interrupt requests) numbers, which will be invoked by the kernel’s generic interrupt handling infrastructure.)
Using MMIOs looks a lot like embedded bare metal programming you might do on a microcontroller like a PIC or Arduino (AVR). At the lowest level, a kernel driver is really just embedded bare metal programming.
Here’s an example of a device driver for UART (serial port) hardware for ARM platforms: linux/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c. If you’re debugging an ARM Linux system via a serial connection, this is might be the driver being used to e.g. show the boot messages.
The lines like:
cr = readb(uap->port.membase + UART010_CR);
are where the real magic happens.
This is simply doing a read from a memory address derived from some base address for the device, plus some offset of the specific register in question. In this case it’s reading some control information from a Control Register.
Device interfaces may range from having just a few to many registers.
To go one step deeper down the rabbit hole, how do devices “end up” at certain physical addresses? How is this physical memory map interface implemented?3
The device/physical address mapping is implemented in digital logic outside the CPU, either on the System on Chip (SOC) (for embedded systems), or on the motherboard (PCs)4. The CPU’s physical interface include the address, data, and control buses. Digital logic converts bits of the address bus into signals that mutually exclusively enable devices that are physically connected to the bus. The implementations of load/store instructions in the CPU set a read/write bit appropriately in the Control bus, which lets devices know whether a read or write is happening. The data bus is where data is either transferred out from or into the CPU.
In practice, documentation for real implementations of these systems can be hard to find, unless you’re a customer of the SoC manufacturer. But there are some out there for older chips, e.g.
Here’s a block diagram for the Tegra 2 SoC architecture, which shipped in products like the Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2, and Motorola Photon. Obviously it’s much more complex than my description above. Other than the two CPU cores in the top left, and the data bus towards the middle, I can’t make sense of it. (link)
While not strictly a “System on Chip”, a classic PIC microcontroller has many shared characteristics of a SoC (CPU, memory, peripherals, all in one chip package), but is much more approachable.
We can see the single MIPS core connected to a variety of peripheral devices on the peripheral bus. There’s even layers of peripheral bussing, with a “Peripheral Bridge” connected to a second peripheral bus for things like I2C and SPI.
An obscure quirk of the /proc/*/mem pseudofile is its “punch through” semantics. Writes performed through this file will succeed even if the destination virtual memory is marked unwritable. In fact, this behavior is intentional and actively used by projects such as the Julia JIT compiler and rr debugger.
This behavior raises some questions: Is privileged code subject to virtual memory permissions? In general, to what degree can the hardware inhibit kernel memory access?
By exploring these questions5, this article will shed light on the nuanced relationship between an operating system and the hardware it runs on. We’ll examine the constraints the CPU can impose on the kernel, and how the kernel can bypass these constraints.
In addition to the well-known -Wall, clang offers another interesting warning flag: -Weverything. While it sounds like a “strictly better” option (the more warnings, the better?) it’s not.
Arthur makes a strong case against use of this flag. The clang docs generally agree, though offering a slightly more lenient position:
If you do use -Weverything then we advise that you address all new compiler diagnostics as they get added to Clang, either by fixing everything they find or explicitly disabling that diagnostic with its corresponding Wno- option.
But what I have not seen clearly expressed is how use of -Weverything is a tradeoff.
If you’re already a 10x engineer, you probably won’t need this article. But for the rest of us, this is what I wish I knew about clang-format as an inexperienced C++ programmer: how to only format the changes in your pull request.
You may have already heard of clang-format. It auto-formats source files for languages including C and C++. You can aim it at a source file and format the entire thing using clang-format -i file.cpp.
If you’re contributing to a project that is already 100% clang-format clean, then this workflow works fine. But you’ll occasionally encounter a project that is not quite 100% formatted, such as LLVM, osquery, or Electron6.
For these projects, the “format entire files” workflow doesn’t work because you’ll incidentally format parts of the files that are unrelated to your contribution. This will add noise to your diff and make it harder for your reviewers.
In this case, you need a way to surgically format only the lines changed in your contribution. To do this, you can use the clang-format git extension. This article will cover the basics of git-clang-format, including a practical workflow that allows for messy development, and formatting at the end.
Pretty recently I learned about setjmp() and longjmp(). They’re a neat pair of libc functions which allow you to save your program’s current execution context and resume it at an arbitrary point in the future (with some caveats7). If you’re wondering why this is particularly useful, to quote the manpage, one of their main use cases is “…for dealing with errors and interrupts encountered in a low-level subroutine of a program.” These functions can be used for more sophisticated error handling than simple error code return values.
I was curious how these functions worked, so I decided to take a look at musl libc’s implementation for x86. First, I’ll explain their interfaces and show an example usage program. Next, since this post isn’t aimed at the assembly wizard, I’ll cover some basics of x86 and Linux calling convention to provide some required background knowledge. Lastly, I’ll walk through the source, line by line.
