GrantReply is a new access right added to endpoint capabilities, which
allows seL4_Call to be used on those capabilities (specifically, it
allows reply caps *only* to be granted across endpoints).
Prior to the addition of GrantReply, endpoint capabilities required the
Grant access right, which allowed any arbitrary capabilitiy to be
transferred over an endpoint. Using GrantReply, systems can now be
constructed where threads using seL4_Call over an endpoint do not need to be in the same
security subsystem.
Instead of switching to the thread contained in `ksSchedulerAction` on a `schedule` we
instead decide between the 'candidate' contained in `ksSchedulerAction`, the current thread
or potentially neither if the candidate is deemed invalid and the current thread is blocked.
A consequence of this change is that it is no longer meaningful to have a distinction between
`switchIfRequiredTo` and `attemptSwitchTo`. Now both these cases simply identify a candidate,
which may or may not be picked in `schedule`. Part of the distinction of `switchIfRequiredTo`
was to not avoid switching if possible when performing notifications. This is now handled by
prefering the current thread over the candidate if the current thread has not blocked.
This change is largely semantic preserving overall, with the exception of non-blocking
synchronous sends now acting like notifications and also preferring to resume running the
current thread.
The motivation for this change was to make it much easier for verification to show
correspondence between the fastpath changes introduced in the previous commit and the
slowpath scheduler.
This commit does the following:
* invert the bit field scheduler for better cache performance for high priority threads
* peeks into the bitfield scheduler to allow fastpath to be leveraged when IPC occurs from lo --> hi priority threads if correct
Where MCP = Maximum Controlled Priority
This commit adds:
* seL4_TCB_SetMCPriority
and changes the arguments to
* seL4_TCB_Configure
As of this commit, a thread cannot create or set a threads
priority (including itself) above its mcp. Previously the kernel
did this check against a threads priority, which prevented a thread
from setting it's own priority down and then up again.
Diminish rights were to prevent a user from sending a writeable
cap over a read only endpoint. It turns out this 'security' can
be worked around without difficulty (by putting caps in a cnode
and sending the cnode) making the current diminish rights
implementation functionally useless.
Removing diminish rights has the benefit of simplifying all the
IPC paths.
This commit deprecates seL4_ReplyWait, removes seL4_NBwait completely,
and changes the return type of seL4_Wait to void (seL4_Wait should be
used for notification objects, and seL4_Recv should be used where
seL4_Wait was used previously for endpoints).
Background
seL4 organizes threads into ready queues, of which there is one for each
domain, for each priority level. The ready queue for a given
domain/priority combination can be found by indexing the array
`ksReadyQueues` with "domain*num_priorities + priority".
Current scheduler implementation
To find the non-empty ready queue with the maximum priority for the current domain,
seL4 iterates through `ksReadyQueues`, starting with the element
corresponding to the current domain and maximum possible priority, and
decrementing the priority until a non-empty queue is found. This is
problematic in cases where the only ready threads have low priorities,
as iterating through many elements of an array effectively flushes the
cache.
Changes in this patch
This patch replaces the iteration with a lookup into a table of
bitfields per domain. Using bitfields allows the kernel to determine the
highest priority level with a non-empty ready queue for the current
domain by counting the leading zeroes in bitfields. This removes the
negative cache effects of iterating through an array.
Implementation details
For each domain, a multilevel table of bitfields is maintained which
stores the priority levels within that domain for which there exist
ready threads. On a 32-bit architecture, the top level of the table is a 32-bit bitfield where if
the ith bit is set, there is at least 1 priority level in
[i*32..i*32+31] with a non-empty ready queue. The positions of bits in
this bitfield are used as indices into the second level table, which is
an array of 32-bit bitfields. The ith bit of the jth bitfield in this
array set to 1, indicates that priority level j*32+i has a non-empty
ready queue.
