This allows schemes to avoid checking the length against zero before
constructing a slice from pointer+len that the kernel gave.
Additionally, the address is now non-canonical on x86, meaning that
userspace will fail instead of continuing with UB, if they would ever
forget to check the length.
This is done by making sure that when empty() is called on a context,
the grants Arc will be replaced with a new unused Arc, hence
decrementing the refcount. Previously this was only done when the
context was actually reaped, but since there is no guarantee as far as I
am aware about when this must happen, the grants could be completely
leaked, leading to the error.
This allows schemes to avoid checking the length against zero before
constructing a slice from pointer+len that the kernel gave.
Additionally, the address is now non-canonical on x86, meaning that
userspace will fail instead of continuing with UB, if they would ever
forget to check the length.
Previously, the kernel used the regular FS segment for Thread-Local
Storage. The problem however, is that userspace code also uses FS for
TLS, meaning that the kernel would have to switch the FS segment between
user and kernel, _upon every syscall_. This is obviously suboptimal for
performance (especially with fast syscalls such as futex, nanosleep, or
yield).
I had to search LLVM for hours, just to find out that the insertion of
the memory load with FS was actually done in the linker, so I added a
flag for that.
I haven't done any proper benchmarking, but the boot process seems to
have gotten much faster!
In order words, it swaps gs both directly at the start of the syscall
handler, then swaps it back, and the at the end of the syscall handler.
I cannot tell for sure why this is necessary, but probably since some
interrupt handler will execute swapgs in the wrong order or something.
Jeremy Soller