Re: Queries concerning RTOS protection in newllib

[Corinna Vinschen <vinschen at redhat dot com>]

On Jun 18 11:24, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jun 17 14:07, Jeff Johnston wrote:
> > While I have no problem in backing off the change for the moment to keep 
> > Cygwin up and running, I would like to see further investigation as to why 
> > Cygwin depends on _GLOBAL_REENT changing in tandem with _REENT 
> > (_impure_ptr).  It might indicate a missing usage of _GLOBAL_REENT in 
> > newlib or a logic flaw in Cygwin.
> 
> Thanks for backing this out for now.  Unfortunately I can't tell for sure
> so far what the exact problem is.  I tried several changes already but
> to no avail.  Unfortunately I don't have experience with the impure_ptr
> stuff so I'm a bit shooting in the dark here.  I'll send a heads up to
> cygwin-developers list.

I have investigated further, triggered by the recent reent problem
and I found why the change to use _global_impure_ptr broke Cygwin.

The reason is that Cygwin never used the impure_data structure and the
original _impure_ptr value provided by newlib, but instead it maintains
its own global struct reent called `reent_data'.  Therefore, all
usages of GLOBAL_REENT inside of newlib pointed to the wrong data structure.

I have a local patch to Cygwin, which allows to revert the definition
of _GLOBAL_REENT to _global_impure_ptr.  The patch removes reent_data
entirely and let Cygwin use the data structures provided by newlib's
impure.c.

Unfortunately, there's a problem left.  reent_data has been exported by
the Cygwin DLL and unfortunately there are apps and libraries out there
which make use of that datastructure, namely libitcl32.a.  That's a pain,
but since backward compatibility is an important factor, we can't just
get rid of the reent_data export.

So I'd like to suggest the following change to newlib.  It aliasses reent_data
to be the same as impure_data and so allows to further export that symbol,
and it reverts _GLOBAL_REENT to _global_impure_ptr.


Corinna


	* libc/reent/impure.c (reent_data): Define as alias to impure_data
	when building for Cygwin.
	* libc/include/sys/reent.h (_GLOBAL_REENT): Revert definition to
	_global_impure_ptr.

Index: libc/reent/impure.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/src/src/newlib/libc/reent/impure.c,v
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -p -u -r1.2 impure.c
--- libc/reent/impure.c 11 Jun 2004 20:37:10 -0000      1.2
+++ libc/reent/impure.c 15 Sep 2004 10:41:34 -0000
@@ -10,5 +10,8 @@
 #endif
 
 static struct _reent __ATTRIBUTE_IMPURE_DATA__ impure_data = _REENT_INIT (impure_data);
+#ifdef __CYGWIN__
+extern struct _reent reent_data __attribute__ ((alias("impure_data")));
+#endif
 struct _reent *__ATTRIBUTE_IMPURE_PTR__ _impure_ptr = &impure_data;
 struct _reent *_CONST __ATTRIBUTE_IMPURE_PTR__ _global_impure_ptr = &impure_data;
Index: libc/include/sys/reent.h
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/src/src/newlib/libc/include/sys/reent.h,v
retrieving revision 1.30
diff -p -u -r1.30 reent.h
--- libc/include/sys/reent.h    9 Sep 2004 19:46:54 -0000       1.30
+++ libc/include/sys/reent.h    15 Sep 2004 10:41:34 -0000
@@ -816,7 +816,7 @@ void _reclaim_reent _PARAMS ((struct _re
 
 #endif /* !_REENT_ONLY */
 
-#define _GLOBAL_REENT _impure_ptr
+#define _GLOBAL_REENT _global_impure_ptr
 
 #ifdef __cplusplus
 }