This patch improves the accounting for the backing store of
session-state meta data. Originally, the session state used to be
allocated by a child-local heap partition fed from the child's RAM
session. However, whereas this approach was somehow practical from a
runtime's (parent's) point of view, the child component could not count
on the quota in its own RAM session. I.e., if the Child::heap grew at
the parent side, the child's RAM session would magically diminish. This
caused two problems. First, it violates assumptions of components like
init that carefully manage their RAM resources (and giving most of them
away their children). Second, if a child transfers most of its RAM
session quota to another RAM session (like init does), the child's RAM
session may actually not allow the parent's heap to grow, which is a
very difficult error condition to deal with.
In the new version, there is no Child::heap anymore. Instead, session
states are allocated from the runtime's RAM session. In order to let
children pay for these costs, the parent withdraws the local session
costs from the session quota donated from the child when the child
initiates a new session. Hence, in principle, all components on the
route of the session request take a small bite from the session quota to
pay for their local book keeping
Consequently, the session quota that ends up at the server may become
depleted more or less, depending on the route. In the case where the
remaining quota is insufficient for the server, the server responds with
'QUOTA_EXCEEDED'. Since this behavior must generally be expected, this
patch equips the client-side 'Env::session' implementation with the
ability to re-issue session requests with successively growing quota
donations.
For several of core's services (ROM, IO_MEM, IRQ), the default session
quota has now increased by 2 KiB, which should suffice for session
requests to up to 3 hops as is the common case for most run scripts. For
longer routes, the retry mechanism as described above comes into effect.
For the time being, we give a warning whenever the server-side quota
check triggers the retry mechanism. The warning may eventually be
removed at a later stage.
Besides adapting the components to the use of base/log.h, the patch
cleans up a few base headers, i.e., it removes unused includes from
root/component.h, specifically base/heap.h and
ram_session/ram_session.h. Hence, components that relied on the implicit
inclusion of those headers have to manually include those headers now.
While adjusting the log messages, I repeatedly stumbled over the problem
that printing char * arguments is ambiguous. It is unclear whether to
print the argument as pointer or null-terminated string. To overcome
this problem, the patch introduces a new type 'Cstring' that allows the
caller to express that the argument should be handled as null-terminated
string. As a nice side effect, with this type in place, the optional len
argument of the 'String' class could be removed. Instead of supplying a
pair of (char const *, size_t), the constructor accepts a 'Cstring'.
This, in turn, clears the way let the 'String' constructor use the new
output mechanism to assemble a string from multiple arguments (and
thereby getting rid of snprintf within Genode in the near future).
To enforce the explicit resolution of the char * ambiguity, the 'char *'
overload of the 'print' function is marked as deleted.
Issue #1987
This patch changes the top-level directory layout as a preparatory
step for improving the tools for managing 3rd-party source codes.
The rationale is described in the issue referenced below.
Issue #1082
