steed VS glibc

The steed project (https://github.com/japaric/steed) attempted to create a pure Rust implementation of std and follow up projects like mustang attempt the same, so this is not as absurd as it might sound.

I really hope that we will get a libc-free Linux target. Mustang/rsix looks like a great step in this direction, similarly to steed (https://github.com/japaric/steed) before it. But I think that ideally it should be done properly in Rust proper, not in outside projects. Here a relevant issue, but there is not much progress on it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2610

At least for rust, a librs would be hard to create due to the lack of a stable ABI. So even if you did a pure rust libstd (like the now defunct Steed[0]), you'd still need to either manually link that libc (breaking the mitigation), or rebuild your program each time the distro updates either libstd or the rust compiler.

I'm not sure what the situation for Go is. Assuming Go has proper support for dynamic loading and a stable ABI, it would be doable.

[0]: https://github.com/japaric/steed

I wonder if you’re using a different definition of ‘vectorized’ from the one I would use. For example glibc provides a vectorized strlen. Here is the sse version: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/x86_64/m...

It’s pretty simple to imagine how to write an unoptimized version: read a vector from the start of the string, compare it to 0, convert that to a bitvector, test for equal to zero, then loop or clz and finish.

I would call this vectorized because it operates on 16 bytes (sse) at a time.

There are a few issues:

1. You’re still spending a lot of time in the scalar code checking loop conditions.

2. You’re doing unaligned reads which are slower on old processors

3. You may read across a cache line forcing you to pull a second line into cache even if the string ends before then.

4. You may read across a page boundary which could cause a segfault if the next page is not accessible

So the fixes are to do 64-byte (ie cache line) aligned accesses which also means page-aligned (so you won’t read from a page until you know the string doesn’t end in the previous page). That deals with alignment problems. You read four vector registers at a time but this doesn’t really cost much more if the string is shorter as it all comes from one cache line. Another trick in the linked code is that it first finds the cache line by reading the first 16 bytes then merging in the next 3 groups with unsigned-min, so it only requires one test against a zero vector instead of 4. Then it finds the zero in the cache line. You need to do a bit of work in the first iteration to become aligned. With AVX, you can use mask registers on reads to handle that first step instead.

That was also my thought. To my knowledge `/etc/localtime` is the creation of Arthur David Olson, the founder of the tz database (now maintained by IANA), but his code never read `/etc/localtime` multiple times unless `TZ` environment variable was changed. Tzcode made into glibc but Ulrich Drepper changed it to not cache `/etc/localtime` when `TZ` is unset [1]; I wasn't able to locate the exact rationale, given that the commit was very ancient (1996-12) and no mailing list archive is available for this time period.

[1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/commit/68dbb3a69e78e24a778c6...

That's not really what the problem is. The actual code is fine.

The issue is that the definition of `fd_set` has a constant size [1]. If you allocate the memory yourself, the select() system call will work with as many file descriptors as you care to pass to it. You can see that both glibc [2] and the kernel [3] support arbitrarily large arrays.

[1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/misc/sys/select....

[2] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/unix/sys...

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

The source code for that is here.

Expanding macro gives three GCC function attributes [2]: `__attribute__ ((malloc))`, `__attribute__ ((alloc_size(1)))` and `__attribute__ ((warn_unused_result))`. They are required for GCC (and others recognizing them) to actually ensure that they behave as the standard dictates. Your own malloc-like functions won't be treated same unless you give similar attributes.

[1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/807690610916df8aef17cd1...

[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Function-Attribute...

IFunc relocations is what enables glibc to dynamically choose the best memcpy routine to use at runtime based on the CPU.

see https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/glibc-2.31/sysdeps/x86_...

memmove can be very well implemented in pure C, libc implementations usually have a "generic" (meaning, architecture independent) fallback. Here is musl generic implementation and its x86-64 assembly implementation. For glibc, implementation is a bit more complex, having multiple architectures implemented, but you could find a generic implementation with these two files: memmove.c and generic/memcopy.h.

Yeah, looks like the Q_strcat(pszContentPath, "/"); is invalid, as glibc has only allocated exactly enough to fit the path in the buffer returned by realpath().

Interestingly, the open group spec says that a null argument to realpath is "Implementation defined" [0]

And the linux (glibc) man pages say it allocates a buffer "Up to PATH_MAX" [1]

I guess "strlen(path)" is "Up to PATH_MAX", but the man page seems unclear - you could read that as implying the buffer is always allocated to PATH_MAX size, but that's not what seems to be happening, just effectively calling strdup() [2]. I have no idea how to feed back to the linux man pages, but might be worth clarifying there.

[0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696799/functions/re...

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/3/realpath

[2] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/0b9d2d4a76508fdcbd9f421...

For the actual sources you will have to look at one of the mirrors of the C standard library, such as https://github.com/bminor/glibc/tree/master/sysdeps/ieee754/dbl-64