I am play­ing around with the patch­set “my” stu­dent gen­er­ated dur­ing this years GSoC (the code for all projects is avail­able from Google). In short, it gives you the pos­si­bil­ity to query from user­land, which optional ker­nel fea­tures are avail­able. I have let him mostly do those fea­tures, which are not so easy to detect from user­land, or where the detec­tion could trig­ger an autoload of a ker­nel mod­ule.

I let the out­put speak for him­self, first the out­put before his patchset:

kern.features.compat_freebsd7: 1
kern.features.compat_freebsd6: 1
kern.features.posix_shm: 1

And now with his patchset:

kern.features.compat_freebsd6: 1
kern.features.compat_freebsd7: 1
kern.features.ffs_snapshot: 1
kern.features.geom_label: 1
kern.features.geom_mirror: 1
kern.features.geom_part_bsd: 1
kern.features.geom_part_ebr: 1
kern.features.geom_part_ebr_compat: 1
kern.features.geom_part_mbr: 1
kern.features.geom_vol: 1
kern.features.invariant_support: 1
kern.features.kdtrace_hooks: 1
kern.features.kposix_priority_scheduling: 1
kern.features.ktrace: 1
kern.features.nfsclient: 1
kern.features.nfsserver: 1
kern.features.posix_shm: 1
kern.features.pps_sync: 1
kern.features.quota: 1
kern.features.scbus: 1
kern.features.softupdates: 1
kern.features.stack: 1
kern.features.sysv_msg: 1
kern.features.sysv_sem: 1
kern.features.sysv_shm: 1
kern.features.ufs_acl: 1

With his patches we have a total of 84 ker­nel fea­tures which can be queried (obvi­ously I do not have all optional options enabled in the ker­nel which pro­duces this out­put). All of the fea­tures also have a descrip­tion, and it is easy to add more fea­tures. As an exam­ple I present what is nec­es­sary to pro­duce the kern.features.stack output:

./kern/subr_stack.c:FEATURE(stack, “Sup­port for cap­tur­ing ker­nel stack”);

There is also a lit­tle user­land appli­ca­tion (and a library inter­face) which allows to query sev­eral fea­tures from scripts/applications with the pos­si­bil­ity to pre­tend a fea­ture is not there (the require­ment for this was for ports; pre­tend­ing a fea­ture is there if it is not was ruled out because such run-time detec­tion is only nec­es­sary for things which have to run soon and pre­tend­ing some fea­ture is there while it is not will cause big prob­lems). Unfor­tu­nately the man page for the appli­ca­tion is not yet ready, but I’m sure you can fig­ure out how to use it.

The names of the fea­tures and the descrip­tion fol­lows an easy scheme, what is writ­ten down in NOTES is used as a name and a descrip­tion for the fea­ture (an excep­tion is geom_part_X, there we decided to use a com­mon theme (“GEOM par­ti­tion­ing class for XXX”) which is dis­tinct from the cor­re­spond­ing geom_X class). If you have com­plains about what is used in a spe­cific fea­ture, do not com­plain to him: change it in NOTES and the fea­ture will follow.

If you have ques­tions, sug­ges­tions, or some other inter­est to con­tact him, his FreeBSD address is kibab@. Feel free to encour­age him to go ahead with the next steps (fin­ish­ing the man page, split­ting up the patches into sen­si­ble pieces and pre­sent­ing them on appro­pri­ate mail­inglists for review).

I stum­bled over Google’s new RE engine. Unfor­tu­nately it is not han­dling back­ref­er­ences, so it is not a drop-in replace­ment for the reg­u­lar expres­sions code in FreeBSD. It has a POSIX mode, but this only seems to be enough for the egrep syn­tax. For peo­ple which need back­ref­er­ences, they refer to the Google Chrome’s RE engine irreg­exp which in turn ref­er­ences a paper from 2007 which is titled Reg­u­lar Expres­sion Match­ing Can Be Sim­ple And Fast.

The tech­niques in the paper can not be applied to the irreg­exp engine, but maybe could help to speed up awk, egrep and sim­i­lar programs.

I think it would be inter­est­ing to com­pare those recent devel­op­ments to what we have in FreeBSD, and if they are faster, to see if it is pos­si­ble to improve the FreeBSD imple­men­ta­tion based upon them (either by writ­ing new code, or by import­ing exist­ing code, depend­ing on the cor­re­spond­ing license and the lan­guage the code is writ­ten in).

Maybe a can­di­date for the GSoC?

Today I had again some energy to look at why mono fails to build on FreeBSD-cur­rent.

I decided to do a debug-build of mono. This did not work ini­tially, I had to pro­duce some patches.

Does this mean nobody is doing debug builds of mono on FreeBSD?

I have to say, this expe­ri­ence with lang/mono is com­pletely unsatisfying.

Ok, bot­tom line, either the debug build seems to pre­vent a race con­di­tion in most cases (I had a lot less lock­ups for each of the two builds I did).

What­ever it is, I do not care ATM (if the con­fig­ure stuff is look­ing at the archi­tec­ture of the sys­tem, it may be the case that the i386-portbld-freebsdX does not enable some impor­tant stuff which would be enabled when run with i486-portbld-freebsdX or bet­ter). Here are the patches I used in case some­one is inter­ested (warn­ing, copy&paste con­verted tabs to spaces, you also have to apply the map.c (a gen­er­ated file… maybe a touch of the right file would allow to apply this patch in the nor­mal patch stage) related stuff when the build fails, else there is some parser error in mono):

--- mcs/class/Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix/UnixProcess.cs.orig       2010-01-29 11:34:00.592323482 +0100
+++ mcs/class/Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix/UnixProcess.cs    2010-01-29 11:34:18.540607357 +0100
@@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ namespace Mono.Unix {
 int r = Native.Syscall.waitpid (pid, out status,
 Native.WaitOptions.WNOHANG | Native.WaitOptions.WUNTRACED);
 UnixMarshal.ThrowExceptionForLastErrorIf (r);
-                       return r;
+                       return status;
 }

 public int ExitCode {

--- mono/io-layer/processes.c.orig    2010-01-29 11:36:08.904331535 +0100
+++ mono/io-layer/processes.c 2010-01-29 11:42:21.819159544 +0100
@@ -160,7 +160,7 @@ static gboolean waitfor_pid (gpointer te
 ret = waitpid (process->id, &status, WNOHANG);
 } while (errno == EINTR);

-       if (ret <= 0) {
+       if (ret == 0 || (ret < 0 && errno != ECHILD)) {
 /* Process not ready for wait */
 #ifdef DEBUG
 g_message ("%s: Process %d not ready for waiting for: %s",
@@ -169,6 +169,17 @@ static gboolean waitfor_pid (gpointer te

 return (FALSE);
 }
+
+       if (ret < 0 && errno == ECHILD) {
+#ifdef DEBUG
+               g_message ("%s: Process %d does not exist (anymore)", __func__,
+                          process->id);
+#endif
+               /* Faking the return status. I do not know if it is correct
+                * to assume a successful exit.
+                */
+               status = 0;
+       }

 #ifdef DEBUG
 g_message ("%s: Process %d finished", __func__, ret);

--- mono/metadata/mempool.c.orig      2010-01-29 11:58:16.871052861 +0100
+++ mono/metadata/mempool.c   2010-01-29 12:30:45.143367454 +0100
@@ -212,12 +212,14 @@ mono_backtrace (int size)

         EnterCriticalSection (&mempool_tracing_lock);
         g_print ("Allocating %d bytesn", size);
+#if defined(HAVE_BACKTRACE_SYMBOLS)
         symbols = backtrace (array, BACKTRACE_DEPTH);
         names = backtrace_symbols (array, symbols);
         for (i = 1; i < symbols; ++i) {
                 g_print ("t%sn", names [i]);
         }
         free (names);
+#endif
         LeaveCriticalSection (&mempool_tracing_lock);
 }

--- mono/metadata/metadata.c.orig     2010-01-29 11:59:38.552316989 +0100
+++ mono/metadata/metadata.c  2010-01-29 12:00:43.957337476 +0100
@@ -3673,12 +3673,16 @@ mono_backtrace (int limit)
         void *array[limit];
         char **names;
         int i;
+#if defined(HAVE_BACKTRACE_SYMBOLS)
         backtrace (array, limit);
         names = backtrace_symbols (array, limit);
         for (i =0; i < limit; ++i) {
                 g_print ("t%sn", names [i]);
         }
         g_free (names);
+#else
+       g_print ("No backtrace available.n");
+#endif
 }
 #endif

--- support/map.c.orig        2010-01-29 12:05:22.374653708 +0100
+++ support/map.c 2010-01-29 12:10:29.024412452 +0100
@@ -216,7 +216,7 @@
 #define _cnm_dump(to_t, from) do {} while (0)
 #endif /* def _CNM_DUMP */

-#ifdef DEBUG
+#if defined(DEBUG) && !defined(__FreeBSD__)
 #define _cnm_return_val_if_overflow(to_t,from,val)  G_STMT_START {   
         int     uns = _cnm_integral_type_is_unsigned (to_t);             
         gint64  min = (gint64)  _cnm_integral_type_min (to_t);           

I try to build mono on FreeBSD-cur­rent (it is a depen­dency of some GNOME pro­gram). Unfor­tu­nately this does not work correctly.

What I see are hangs of the build. If I stop the build when it hangs and restart it, it will con­tinue and suc­ceed to process the build steps a lit­tle bit fur­ther, but then it hangs again.

If I ktrace the hang­ing process, I see that there is a call to wait return­ing with the error mes­sage that the child does not exist. Then there is a call to nanosleep.

It looks to me like this process missed some SIGCLD (or is wait­ing for some­thing which did not exist at all), and a loop is wait­ing for a child to exit. This loop prob­a­bly has no proper con­di­tion for the fact that there is no such child (any­more). As such it will stay for­ever in this loop.

So I grepped a litte bit around in mono and found the fol­low­ing code in <mono-src-dir>/mcs/class/Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix/UnixProcess.cs:

public void WaitForExit ()
{
    int status;
    int r;
    do {
        r = Native.Syscall.waitpid (pid, out status, (Native.WaitOptions) 0);
    } while (UnixMarshal.ShouldRetrySyscall (r));
    UnixMarshal.ThrowExceptionForLastErrorIf (r);
}

This does look a lit­tle bit as it could be related to the prob­lem I see, but Shoul­dRetrySyscall only returns true if the errno is EINTR. So this looks cor­rect.

I looked a lit­tle bit more at this file and it looks like either I do not under­stand the seman­tic of this lan­guage, or Get­ProcessSta­tus does return the return­value of the wait­pid call instead of the sta­tus (which is not what it shall return to my under­stand­ing). If I am cor­rect, it can not really detect the sta­tus of a process. It would be very bad if such a fun­da­men­tal thing went unno­ticed in mono…  which does not put a good light on the unit-tests (if any) or the gen­eral test­ing of mono. For this rea­son I hope I am wrong.

I did not stop there, as this part does not look like it is the prob­lem. I found the fol­low­ing in mono/io-layer/processes.c:

static gboolean waitfor_pid (gpointer test, gpointer user_data)
{
...
    do {
        ret = waitpid (process->id, &status, WNOHANG);
    } while (errno == EINTR);

    if (ret <= 0) {
        /* Process not ready for wait */
#ifdef DEBUG
        g_message ("%s: Process %d not ready for waiting for: %s",
                   __func__, process->id, g_strerror (errno));
#endif

        return (FALSE);
    }

#ifdef DEBUG
    g_message ("%s: Process %d finished", __func__, ret);
#endif

    process->waited = TRUE;
...
}

And here we have the prob­lem, I think. I changed the (ret <= 0) to  (ret == 0 || (ret < 0 && errno != ECHILD)). This will not really give the cor­rect sta­tus, but at least it should not block any­more and I should be able to see the dif­fer­ence dur­ing the build.

And now after test­ing, I see a dif­fer­ence, but the prob­lem is still there. The wait with ECHILD is gone in the loop, but there is still some loop with a sem­a­phore operation:

62960 mono     CALL  clock_gettime(0xd,0xbf9feef8)
62960 mono     RET   clock_gettime 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  nanosleep(0xbf9fef84,0)
62960 mono     RET   nanosleep 0
62960 mono     CALL  clock_gettime(0xd,0xbf9feef8)
62960 mono     RET   clock_gettime 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  semop(0x20c0000,0xbf9feef6,0x1)
62960 mono     RET   semop 0
62960 mono     CALL  nanosleep(0xbf9fef84,0)

OK, there is more going on. I think some­one with more knowl­edge about mono should have a look at this (do not only look at this semop thing, but also look why it loses a child).