First draft: rewrite of {get|set|swap}context(3)

Marcel Moolenaar marcel at xcllnt.net
Sun Aug 17 15:06:26 PDT 2003


On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 05:12:29PM -0400, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
> 
> > Please review the attached patch and let me know to what extend it
> > introduces breakages. It is the result of "aggressive engineering"
> > to provoke comments and further fuel discussion. The reason for this
> > approach is that we currently do not initialize any fields other than
> > the mcontext and sigmask and only partially copyin() and copyout()
> > the contexts (typically only the mcontext and sigmask fields). This
> > generally is very sensitive to breakages, especially when we intro-
> > duce flags or need to use any of the spare fields.
> > 
> > getcontext(3): the whole ucontext is zeroed before (partially) filled
> > 	and we copyout() all of it. This means that uc_link can only
> > 	be set/defined after calling setcontext().
> 
> This prevents reuse of the same context without resetting
> uc_link after every usage.  I don't see any requirement
> by POSIX that uc_link be left intact after getcontext(),
> but it might be worth preserving...  It's up to you.

Yes, it's a tricky issue. I'll begin runtime testing and think about
it some more. I don't want to rush it...

BTW: I think we need to preserve uc_stack as well.

-- 
 Marcel Moolenaar	  USPA: A-39004		 marcel at xcllnt.net


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