Re: NFS HEADS UP (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys/nfs nfsm_subs.h xdr_subs.h)
Matthew Dillon said: > :> global references across subroutine calls! I'll send Luoqi another email. > :> > :> In the case of the NFS stuff, the changes have been pretty well tested > :> so I think we are in the clear. > : > :On a somewhat similar note, what do you think about converting a lot > :of the NFS macros to functions, yes i know it will be difficult, but > :there is so much forced inlining it just seems like it would reduce > :the codesize signifigantly and play nicer with the CPU cache. > : > :It would also make the code a lot more readable. > : > :Worthwhile exercise? > : > :-Alfred Perlstein - [[EMAIL PROTECTED]|[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Well, the issue with converting many of the macros to inline functions > is with the embedded goto's and references to variables defined outside > the macros. Converting them to functions would basically require > rewriting a huge chunk of NFS code. > My working kernel runs with a few strategic NFS macros being converted to functions, and the size improvement is about 50K or so (maybe more!!!) John To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: NFS HEADS UP (was Re: cvs commit: src/sys/nfs nfsm_subs.h xdr_subs.h)
Matthew Dillon said: > :> Well, the issue with converting many of the macros to inline functions > :> is with the embedded goto's and references to variables defined outside > :> the macros. Converting them to functions would basically require > :> rewriting a huge chunk of NFS code. > :> > :My working kernel runs with a few strategic NFS macros being converted > :to functions, and the size improvement is about 50K or so (maybe more!!!) > : > :John > > If you want to port some of it in that part of the source tree will be > available in a month or two, depending on how quickly the other stuff in > my queue gets committed. I've got two patch sets currently under test > related to other NFS issues and a third one in the wings. > The changes are "semi-trivial", and hope that a new kernel hacker can take a crack at it. Part of my comment however true, was meant as a tease to get more kernel people involved (helping the cause.) Anything that any of us does can be done by others, and fostering a talent search is a good thing (IMO.) I am willing to provide the info, but hope that a naiscent kernel hacker comes forward... John To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Memory usage weirdness
Dan Root said: Content-Description: Mail message > > Is this normal, or should I look for some process that's thrashing through > vast amounts of pages in short periods of time? > It is normal and expected. A little secret about FreeBSD's VM is that it works on a page demand type timeclock and not an arbitrary real time timeclock. This helps the system (partially) to be self-tuning. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: aio_read panics SMP kernel
Brian Dean said: > > I'm using a dual 350MHz Dell Precision 410 with 4.0-19990130-SNAP (SMP > enabled) to prototype a program that uses asynchronous read and write > (aio_read() and aio_write()), and found that the following simple and > not very useful program (it's for demonstration purposes only!) causes > the system to do one of three things: > The VM code needs to be upgraded to support proper threading and shared address space operations under SMP. That is a major missing feature, and probably something that should be higher priority than it currently is. I have experimental work to support it (and alot of other interesting things), but it will probably be quite a while before those who are currently working on the code will be able to add the capability. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: more about yield() versus sched_yield()
Richard Seaman, Jr. said: > > As I indicated to you several weeks ago, I think it is possible to have > a priority inversion problem in spinlocks that spin on sched_yield. > The yield call, as implemented, partly addresses the issue. However, > as you commented to me, it does so poorly. > > If the consensus is to drop or modify SYS_yield, my vote would be to > give consideration to changing the call to more correctly address the > priority inversion issue. Possibly a yield (pid_t pid) where the > pid passed in is the pid of the thread (process) holding a lock. The > system could then check the credentials of the pid to see if there > is permission (eg. its a kernel thread of the same process) and if > so, raise the priority of pid to that of the calling process for one > time slice so pid has a chance to execute and free the lock. > I didn't add the system call to the library (yet), because wasn't sure if it was working the way that I wanted. I do suggest that there be only one (yield) type system call, and if special behavior is desired, then give an argument describing the special behavior. I suggest that the yield that is kept should be the one where there is a current maintainer for it :-). -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: swap_page_getswapspace failed (don't do stupid things with /dev/mem)
Matthew Dillon said: > :Matt, > : > :Does datasize limit the number of backed pages, or the amount of address > :space used by a process? I.e., can I grow myself a large chunk of address > :space using mmap to the same region of a file, and then read into that > :large chunk (presumably larger than the cache size if I want to be nasty)? > :If datasize only affects backed pages, then we can still do nasty large > :copies; if it affects address space, then nasty large copies are limited > :to the size of the writable address space (if using readv) or the size of > :the largest contiguous writable space (if using read). > : > : Robert N Watson > : > :rob...@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ > :PGP key fingerprint: 03 01 DD 8E 15 67 48 73 25 6D 10 FC EC 68 C1 1C > > The 'datasize' limit does not effect mmap(), only brk/sbrk. So, > in fact, I believe you can bypass the datasize limit by allocating > anonymous memory using mmap(). > > This is probably a bug. We should either limit the mmap()able space to > about the same size as the data segment limit, or keep track of the > amount of anonymous mapped memory and count that in the datasize > limit. > FYI, the information that provides the virtual space used by a map (process) is in the vm_map data structure (so you don't need to reinvent it.) It is now used by PS also. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Significant page coloring improvement
When reviewing the VM code regarding another issue (another significant VM contributor had found an interesting anomoly), I noticed that the coloring wasn't as complete as it should be. Attached is a patch that appears to make a reasonable improvement in performance, when using both my slightly more advanced VM kernel, and also the stuff in -current. I seem to see a fork() only performance improvement of about 10% on a 2 processor SMP PPro, using lmbench. On vfork (which isn't completely implemented on a PPro, but is still faster than fork), the improvement appears to be about 5%. Of course, any page coloring improvement is dependent on alot of factors, but the missing object coloring handling is a problem... -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. Index: vm/vm_object.c === RCS file: /local/home/ncvs/src/sys/vm/vm_object.c,v retrieving revision 1.144 diff -r1.144 vm_object.c 215a216 > kmem_object->pg_color = (kernel_object->pg_color + PQ_L2_SIZE/4) & > PQ_L2_MASK; 945a947 > result->pg_color = (source->pg_color + OFF_TO_IDX(*offset)) & > PQ_L2_MASK;
Re: Significant page coloring improvement
Matthew Dillon said: > > Ah, interesting. I understand the second bit. The first bit seems > somewhat odd, though - the automatic page coloring adjustment made > by _vm_object_allocate() doesn't work well enough for kmem_object? > The problem with it was that there appeared to be a clash. The color allocation in _vm_object_allocate is ad-hoc, and tuned for a general case, essentially randomizing the coloring (but also statistically coloring processes approximately correctly.) My original code (and I forget if the current code does this) attempts to color the objects (or pages in the objects) so that there isn't much overlap in normal processes. There is still an opportunity to improve the color allocations. I also have some mods that remove the L1 coloring (since it is overkill, and just complicates the code.) L2 coloring (or L3 as appropriate on machines like Alphas) is all that is needed!!! I did the L1 coloring for an exercise, and forgot reality when I committed the code :-). (Okay, that isn't quite true, I did think that L1 coloring would have been useful -- but after alot of thought and paper research, have decided that L1 page coloring for a small L1 cache is kind-of useless.) If you want to see the L1 mods and perhaps remove the L1 coloring, you are welcome and it would be a good thing to remove it. The L1 mods are pretty much straight-forward, and might be a compromise between removing the coloring all together and keeping all of the complexity. I do suggest that the base color allocation (and proper management of the coloring) would be a good day or so project to clean-up. Again, right now, the coloring looks okay, and the kernel page coloring choices were just a degenerate case. The low level coloring code is good -- so improving the upper level mgmt is fertile ground. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Significant page coloring improvement
Matthew Dillon said: > > : next_index += PQ_L2_SIZE/4; > : if (next_index > PQ_L2_MASK) > : next_index = (next_index + 1) & PQ_L2_MASK; > > Oops, make that: > > next_index += PQ_L2_SIZE/4; > if (next_index > PQ_L2_MASK) > next_index = (next_index + PQ_PRIME1) & PQ_L2_MASK; > > Or even just: > > next_index = (next_index + PQ_PRIME1) & PQ_L2_MASK; > > Both seem to work pretty well w/ lmbench, though nothing really sticks > its nose out. > The reason why you might want to incr by PQ_L2_SIZE/N (or some other large number) is that it will likely decrease conflicts for larger objects. Note that the color should be chosen with more context (virtual address or memory region type like shared lib) than I originally implemented. There are better approaches that take into consideration dynamic conflicts. Such dynamic conflicts might be more complex to determine, and a good static choice adds only minimal overhead, yet provides some improvement. I suggest that until a major project can be undertaken, the static stuff is the right thing. It is easy to screw things up (as you can tell by my original choice for coloring being suboptimal, but not necessarily destructive.) I am agnostic regarding the coloring scheme, but I am glad that removing L1 coloring might be acceptable... If anything, it will decrease instruction cache footprint, and not cause a significant (hopefully any) decrease in performance. I will try to package up the patches (it is an issue of merging them in from my codebase.) They are essentially a result of hand optimizing the case of setting PQ_L1_SIZE to 1. Give me a day or so to put it together. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Significant page coloring improvement
Matthew Dillon said: > > Ah, interesting. I understand the second bit. The first bit seems > somewhat odd, though - the automatic page coloring adjustment made > by _vm_object_allocate() doesn't work well enough for kmem_object? > There appears to be a clash. I haven't really carefully evaluate it, but did see a small improvement. (I hate tweaks though!!!) I guess until a more scientific approach can be established, better tweaks are better than worse tweaks :-). -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Problems in VM structure ?
Matthew Dillon said: > :maxusers 256 > > Try reducing maxusers to 128. Another person reported similar behavior > to me and after a bunch of work he tried going back to a basic > distribution -- and everything started working again. > > It turned out that a maxusers value of 256 and 512 were causing his > machine > to go poof, but a maxusers value of 128 worked fine. > > I haven't tracked the problem down yet. Please try reducing your maxusers > to 128 and email the results to current. > Likely because data structures are getting too big. The kernel is limited to (I forget) how big in VA space. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: SMP and SO5.0
Julian Elischer said: > > > On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Luoqi Chen wrote: > > You may try my patch at http://www.freebsd.org/~luoqi, which would allow > > linux threads to run on SMP. > > I've gone through these patches and I can see that they are really needed > for SMP where address spaces are shared. > I agree -- a per-cpu page directory per multithreaded process is the way that I had implemented. Excellent!!! -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Filesystem deadlock
Luoqi Chen said: > > > This seems to be the good old vnode deadlock during vm_fault() that has been > reported a couple of times, and there's still no satisfactory solution to it: > fgrep does something like this: (don't ask me why) > > addr = mmap(0, len, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE, fd, offset); > read(fd, addr, count); > > the read() syscall first locks the vnode, read the data from disk, then copy > the data to buffer at addr, now if addr is not in core, there'll be a page > fault and the fault handler vm_fault will try to lock the vnode pager backing > the page at addr, which is already locked, deadlock. This deadlock then > propagates all the way back to the root vnode and the whole system would > freeze. > I believe that I had a pseudo-fix to that, and it might have been removed. (In non-multithreaded kernels, when having to do things like the above, allowing recursive locks under certain circumstances can solve the problem. The key is to avoid the case where it covers up real bugs.) -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt said: > > It "should" work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, > hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card > at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just > fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support > it. > I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Filesystem deadlock
Luoqi Chen said: > > > Do you still have that piece of code? Does it handle the case involves more > than one process? For example, process 1 mmaps file B and reads file A into > the mmapped region, while process 2 mmaps file A and reads file B, this could > also result in a deadlock. > It used to be part of the tree, but I seem to remember that it was removed (by those who understand the code :-)) soon after I left. I will look for it, and see if it would help with the problem(s). -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Søren Schmidt said: > It seems John S. Dyson wrote: > > Søren Schmidt said: > > > > > > It "should" work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, > > > hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card > > > at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just > > > fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support > > > it. > > > > > I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions > > of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. > > Bingo, looking at the HW specs I was pretty sure it would, but not > being able to try it, I wouldn't bet on it. > The BIOS on those boards are a different story, I run mine without > the BIOS too, but then one has to setup the tranferrates etc by > hand. > Now, that is INTERESTING. With the bios that I have, all of the ports on both boards get configured properly, and run UDMA. Next time I crack my box open, I'll let you know the bios version and board (and bios) positions. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Promise IDE board docs
Martin Cracauer said: > In <199902230725.caa02...@y.dyson.net>, John S. Dyson wrote: > > Søren Schmidt said: > > > > > > It "should" work, but the promise support in the old system is, well, > > > hacky at best. I'm not sure if Promise supports more than one card > > > at a time, but from looking at the chip specs, it should work just > > > fine, and if the hardware works, at least the new driver will support > > > it. > > > > > I run with two (2) boards, but it appears that certain (all?) versions > > of the bios require that you remove the chip from all but one board. > > I did run such a setup as well, but the disks on the first controller > with BIOS ran much faster than those on the BIOSless controller. > The order of the boards is critical, and which bios is installed. Of course, YMMV. Each drive on each controller in my case runs at full speed :-). On the bootup sequence, I get one BIOS display of eight drive slots, as if I am using one board, with 8 drive positions (even though I really have two boards.) Of course, the PCI bus probes the controllers as two controllers, but the BIOS kind of acts like one logical controller. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: gcc
John Polstra said: > In article <19990228152909.e2...@relay.nuxi.com>, > David O'Brien wrote: > > > I keep on hearing about how we're losing because we don't have the 3 > > > month old latest feature > > > > With EGCS the issue isn't having the latest 3 mo. feature, but we have a > > totally BROKEN C++ compiler. > > Yes. We desperately need to upgrade our compiler, and egcs looks > like it's definitely the way to go. > > > What I have won't build kernels yet. I could hack our system Makefiles > > to use different compile options, but I don't like that approach. So > > I'm working on adding our compiler flags and such. > > Hang on. Others have reported success building kernels with egcs. > But even if there are problems, don't jump to the conclusion that > they are caused by compiler bugs. Linux also had problems building > working kernels at first, but the problems turned out to be caused by > incorrect clobber specs in "asm" statements. Such errors have also > been found in the FreeBSD kernel. Some of them have been fixed, but > maybe not all of them. In any case, the problems should be fixed at > their source, not kludged around in the compiler. > I can generally build a kernel with EGCS, if I change how the .text and .data are laid out for initialized data. It seems that the initialization code makes assumptions about the order or layout of the initialization data. Once the stuff is made to act more like the version of GCC that FreeBSD uses, the kernel will most often build and work. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: gcc
Jordan K. Hubbard said: > > I can generally build a kernel with EGCS, if I change how the .text and > > .data are laid out for initialized data. It seems that the initialization > > code makes assumptions about the order or layout of the initialization > > data. Once the stuff is made to act more like the version of GCC that > > FreeBSD uses, the kernel will most often build and work. > > It really does appear to be a simple matter of first making egcs "take over" > the system compiler: > Okay, I guess I have been missing something :-). -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: gcc
Chuck Robey said: > On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, John S. Dyson wrote: > > > I can generally build a kernel with EGCS, if I change how the .text and > > .data are laid out for initialized data. It seems that the initialization > > code makes assumptions about the order or layout of the initialization > > data. Once the stuff is made to act more like the version of GCC that > > FreeBSD uses, the kernel will most often build and work. > > I'd like to experiment ... Next time you go to the trouble of making a > kernel with egcs, could you make a few notes on those changes, and post > them? > Okay, but JKH isn't having troubles... Hmmm... I do work with the latest CVS checkout on egcs, so there could be a minor difference there. I might play with it tonight, and I do have a generally working copy of egcs-current right now... If it isn't tonight, will be tomorrow. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: gcc
John Polstra said: > John S. Dyson wrote: > > Jordan K. Hubbard said: > >> > I can generally build a kernel with EGCS, if I change how the .text and > >> > .data are laid out for initialized data. It seems that the > >> > initialization > >> > code makes assumptions about the order or layout of the initialization > >> > data. Once the stuff is made to act more like the version of GCC that > >> > FreeBSD uses, the kernel will most often build and work. > >> > >> It really does appear to be a simple matter of first making egcs "take > >> over" > >> the system compiler: > >> > > Okay, I guess I have been missing something :-). > > Keep in mind that a whole bunch of stuff connected with kernel > initialization has been changed lately. It may be simply that you're > dealing with an older vintage kernel. > Ahhaaa... That must be it -- I have a parallel track VM system project going. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: lockmgr panic with mmap()
Brian Feldman said: > > > > The lock manager isn't bright enough to detect that the process > > already holds a read lock when it attempts to get the write lock. > > Thus, you get the "thrd_sleep" instead of a panic. > > > > In short, same bug, different symptoms. > > > Ahh, makes sense. > > Quick question: how in the heck did you learn this whole VM system? > Alan has had a history helping on the VM code for quite a while, and has contributed some really good ideas. Frankly, he appears to understand the code as well as anyone does. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Killed Myself
Eivind Eklund said: > On Tue, Nov 17, 1998 at 09:49:31PM -0500, HighWind Software Information wrote: > > > > After installing the recent libc_r and libc, I'm getting: > > > > ld.so failed: Undefined symbol "SYS_kldsym" in > > make:/usr/lib/aout/libc.so.3.1 > > > > I also get it sometimes when I link against libc_r. > > > > "SYS_kldsym" is always the thing I don't seem to have a definition for. > > > > This just started happening. UGH! > > If you do not know how FreeBSD works to a detailed enough level to NOT > HAVE TO ASK THIS, then you should MAKE WORLD. You should NOT try to > do incremental recompiles. That is reserved for those people that > know exactly what they are doing. > And those who know exactly what they are doing still get zapped. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: Killed Myself
Eivind Eklund said:
> On Mon, Mar 08, 1999 at 05:59:05PM -0500, John S. Dyson wrote:
> > Eivind Eklund said:
> > > If you do not know how FreeBSD works to a detailed enough level to NOT
> > > HAVE TO ASK THIS, then you should MAKE WORLD. You should NOT try to
> > > do incremental recompiles. That is reserved for those people that
> > > know exactly what they are doing.
> >
> > And those who know exactly what they are doing still get zapped.
>
> Of course - but we know not to ask :-)
>
I agree... This is a deal where people need to know the limits of their
experience. Of course, it is good when people try to push themselves.
When people delve deeper and deeper into the system, it seems that there
are more and more ways of burning oneself. Anything like new system calls,
changing kernel data structures and (even worse) on disk formats is more
or less tricky for anyone. With experience, ones is surprised less and less,
but still mistakes do happen :-(.
Is this clearly noted somewhere? I know that it is common knowledge, but
as new people use the system (and get adventureous) some of 'em will get
burnt with mistakes.
Back in the late '70's, I started investigating C as a programming language. It
took a week to get a "hello world" to compile and link. I was an island,
without any
support from anyone. Such experiences do teach one to be somewhat tolerant.
My mistake: I came from a DEC programming world, and I wrote the program
like this:
Main()
{
Printf("Hello world\n");
}
My brain wasn't trained to be case sensitive (of course, it is now), but that
was a most irritating experience.
--
John | Never try to teach a pig to sing,
dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid
jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: VM86 assembly code problem
Matthew Dillon said: > :There're a couple of places in swtch.s where code looks like this, > : > :#ifdef VM86 > :btrl%esi, _private_tss > :je 3f > : ... > :3: > :#endif > : > :The conditional jump statement doesn't seem right, according to manual, > :btrl instruction modifies CF flag but not Z, so the jump should be jae/jb > :instead of je/jne. Could anyone confirm this? > : > :-lq > > btrl only effects the Carry. The VM86 code looks wrong to me, though > there is an outside chance that it is doing a conditional jump based > on something that occured prior to the btrl. > Even though you are correct in practice, the Intel Architecture Software developer's manual #2 says that the ZF is undefined, not that it is unchanged. In fact, the above code sequence is incorrect "by the book." -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: rfork()
Michael E. Mercer said: > Hello, > > This was posted to freebsd-questions with no reply. > I tried this and the child process created a core file. > I also tried the other options and they seem to work. > Just RFPROC and RFMEM DON'T! > rfork(RFMEM) doesn't easily work from C. You need to create an assembly stub. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: rfork()
> On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, John S. Dyson wrote: > > > Michael E. Mercer said: > > > Hello, > > > > > > This was posted to freebsd-questions with no reply. > > > I tried this and the child process created a core file. > > > I also tried the other options and they seem to work. > > > Just RFPROC and RFMEM DON'T! > > > > > rfork(RFMEM) doesn't easily work from C. You need to > > create an assembly stub. > > > > -- > > John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, > > dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid > > jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. > > > > I've seen about 6 people ask about this because the manual lies about > what is done. I asked a while back about it, and John was kind enough > to dig up some code that used rfork to properly split the stack should > I try to dig it up? > I suggest trying to find the example. I might have it sitting around here also. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: UPDATE4: ATA/ATAPI driver new version available.
Soren Schmidt said: > > DMA support has been added to the ATA disk driver. > This only works on Intel PIIX3/4, Acer Aladdin and Promise controllers. > The promise support works without the BIOS on the board, > and timing modes are set to support up to UDMA speed. This > solves the problems with having more than one promise controller > in the same system. > Excellent!!! -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: SMP users (important)
Alan Cox said: > > I've committed the basic infrastructure to improve TLB management > on SMPs. Translation: this will lead to the elimination of a LOT > of interprocessor interrupts to invalidate TLB entries. I'll be > "turning on" the new mechanisms slowly so we can carefully debug > each step and (hopefully) avoid any problems. > (To the rest of the team, Alan and Luoqi already know my opinion.) I just wanted to "chime in" and say that the new patches are based on a really good concept, and is much cleaner than the previous method. Also, many RISC architectures can utilize this method due to the availability of lots of general registers. (One could go so far as to have the compiler reserve the register.) Non-threaded user mode apps could optionally use the reserved register, but for threaded user mode apps, that reserved register could also be used as a per-thread base pointer. I believe that NT does the above (%fs for X86, and general register for Alpha.) On PPC, there are several local, per-processor registers that one could use (but loading a general register with that per processor register would be needed for access.) Also, since the PPC has lots of registers, one could? permanently reserve one of the general registers (r13?). All in all, this change has the potential for better context switching time (and less memory/better performance for multi-threaded processes.) This is a serious, non-trivial movement in the *right* direction!!! :-). SMP users should be pleased with this movement (I certainly am!!!) -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dy...@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid jdy...@nc.com | and it irritates the pig. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: SMP users (important)
> > > per-processor registers that one could use (but loading a > > general register with that per processor register would be > > needed for access.) Also, since the PPC has lots of registers, > > one could? permanently reserve one of the general registers (r13?). > > I really don't like the idea of breaking the normal language > conventions for any processor. For the i386, the use of segment > registers is not relevant to C language conventions, but reserving a > general register on any architecture should, IMHO, be avoided if at > all possible. > I believe that SYSV might do it. > > I believe that having meaningful values context-switched in segment > registers can add context switch overhead. It shouldn't be > significant, though. > It is probably *much* cheaper than the VM approaches. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
