The linker scripts use to fill alignment gaps within the text section
with the magic value 0x90909090, which correponds to the opcodes of four
nop instructions on x86. This patch removes this value because it
apparently solves no problem. If, for some reason (e.g., due to a dangling
pointer) a thread executes instructions within alignment paddings, NOP
instructions are not any better than any other instruction. The program
will eventually execute the instructions after the padding, which is
most likely fatal. It would be more reasonable to fill the padding with
the opcode of an illegal instruction so that such an error can be
immediately detected. That said, I cannot remember a single instance,
where the fill value has helped us during debugging.
Even if the mechanism served a purpose on x86, it is still better to
remove it because it does not equally work on the other architectures
where the linker scripts are used. I.e., on ARM, the opcode 0x90909090
is not a NOP instruction.
In the init configuration one can configure the donation of CPU time via
'resource' tags that have the attribute 'name' set to "CPU" and the
attribute 'quantum' set to the percentage of CPU quota that init shall
donate. The pattern is the same as when donating RAM quota.
! <start name="test">
! <resource name="CPU" quantum="75"/>
! </start>
This would cause init to try donating 75% of its CPU quota to the child
"test". Init and core do not preserve CPU quota for their own
requirements by default as it is done with RAM quota.
The CPU quota that a process owns can be applied through the thread
constructor. The constructor has been enhanced by an argument that
indicates the percentage of the programs CPU quota that shall be granted
to the new thread. So 'Thread(33, "test")' would cause the backing CPU
session to try to grant 33% of the programs CPU quota to the thread
"test". By now, the CPU quota of a thread can't be altered after
construction. Constructing a thread with CPU quota 0 doesn't mean the
thread gets never scheduled but that the thread has no guaranty to receive
CPU time. Such threads have to live with excess CPU time.
Threads that already existed in the official repositories of Genode were
adapted in the way that they receive a quota of 0.
This commit also provides a run test 'cpu_quota' in base-hw (the only
kernel that applies the CPU-quota scheme currently). The test basically
runs three threads with different physical CPU quota. The threads simply
count for 30 seconds each and the test then checks wether the counter
values relate to the CPU-quota distribution.
fix#1275
On ARM it's relevant to not only distinguish between ordinary cached memory
and write-combined one, but also having non-cached memory too. To insert the
appropriated page table entries e.g.: in the base-hw kernel, we need to preserve
the information about the kind of memory from allocation until the pager
resolves a page fault. Therefore, this commit introduces a new Cache_attribute
type, and replaces the write_combined boolean with the new type where necessary.
On ARM, when machine instructions get written into the data cache
(for example by a JIT compiler), one needs to make sure that the
instructions get written out to memory and read from memory into
the instruction cache before they get executed. This functionality
is usually provided by a kernel syscall and this patch adds a generic
interface for Genode applications to use it.
Fixes#1153.
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
