Namely, the global allocator API in Rust, actually only returns a null
pointer on failure, rather than wrapping it in a Result, which AllocRef
does. Since Box::from_raw(null) is direct UB, this can in theory lead to
very strange behavior.
Note that this is very preliminary, and I merely got my already freezing
kernel branch not to triple fault, but I would probably apply this patch
to upstream.
What is changed here, is that rather than relying on recursive mapping
for accessing page table frames, it now uses linear translation
(virt=phys+KERNEL_OFFSET). The only problem is that the paging code now
makes assumptions that the entire physical address space remains mapped,
which is not necessarily the case on x86_64 architecturally, even though
systems with RAM more than a PML4 are very rare. We'd probably lazily
(but linearly) map physical address space using huge pages.
This also removes the need to do another semi-expensive remap when
cloning processes, since the KPCRs (for kernel TLS) are no longer stored
in the user PML4.
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.
So, when I first introduced io_uring, it was not compiled with the
`multi_core` kernel feature, mainly to make development easier (I
thought). However, since io_uring allows multiple simultaneous system
calls, we cannot longer make the in-kernel contexts block, for example
when receiving a message from a pipe, if there can be multiple such
requests simultaneously.
This has required me to change WaitCondition into allowing multiple
simultaneous tasks; although, it introduces a potential race condition:
since a future can only return Pending and not block directly before
releasing the lock (condvar logic), we need some way to make sure that
nothing happens after the context finds out that it has to wait, and the
actual waiting. If a message is pushed in between, and the waker is
called (Context::unblock), just before it was going to block itself,
then we miss the message, and potentially cause a deadlock.
Fortunately, in order to block and unblock contexts, we need to
exclusively lock the context. So, what we can do to ensure that waking
while running is no longer a no-op, is to introduce a "wake flag", which
is set only if the context is currently running, and Runnable.
But, this still caused all weird kinds of hard-to-debug problems, with
arbitrary CPU exceptions and possibly memory corruption. The reason for
this, is that the context switching logic uses really unsafe operations,
which is why context switching (at the moment) requires an exclusive
lock. Before this commit, it would modify the `running` field after the
lock had been released, which obviously can cause a data race, when the
regular context waker code that is run within a system call, locks the
context but not the global switching lock.
The solution was to make sure that the locks were held, all the way
until the actual switching, which was done in assembly. There can still
be a race condition here, since it modifies memory containing registers
after the lock has been released, even if it may be behind &mut on
another context, which can be UB, but it has not contributed to any
actual bugs... yet.
* I have not yet done that rigorous testing, but it appears to work well
enough, and I have not encountered the bug after like 10 tries.
This solves a bug, that allows processes in different address spaces to
be the target of a futex wakeup call, even though that process is in
another address space!
Jeremy Soller