develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from May 2016

Re: revert MG consting (Coro breakage) for 5.24?

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Dave Mitchell
Date:
May 3, 2016 21:22
Subject:
Re: revert MG consting (Coro breakage) for 5.24?
Message ID:
20160503212220.GE3115@iabyn.com
On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 07:40:22PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 04:56:31PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote:
> > Rik, 
> > I hadn't realised until recently that the Coro breakage caused by
> > consting the MGF vtable array in commit v5.21.7-98-gc910fea, is still
> > unresolved.
> > 
> > I propose that we revert this commit for 5.24 (we need another RC anyway
> > for the SvGROW) issue.
> 
> What does this gain?
> 
> Coro still won't compile against 5.24.x without other changes (due to your
> context stack reworking), and still won't compile against 5.22.x (because this
> wouldn't be backported).
> 
> > This should have relatively minimal effect (apart from 4K extra memory
> > usage per process), since all it would be doing is removing a constraint
> > on XS code (the vtable array can now be modified by XS code again).
> 
> So as best I can tell, all this achieves is a 4K increase in memory usage
> per process. It doesn't fix Coro. What's the upside?

Apparently it is hard to make Coro work without the vtable being
modifiable. The vtable consting, although desirable, is a relatively
trivial gain for perl, and its loss is relatively small. It just means
that an extra 4K from a 2Mb executable can be shared across processes when
2 or more perls are running on the same system. And allows us to stop
XS code from doing weird stuff with some of our internals.

So it's a partial fix for Coro. I have no idea what use Coro makes of the
context stack, or whether its doing something subtle which is
fundamentally unfixable under the recent context changes in blead; but it
may happen that its easily fixable within Coro. In that case, that makes
it theoretically possible for a Coro to be released that runs on perl
5.24.0 and later. Without the const revert, we may remove this possibility
altogether.

I had a very quick look at the Coro src; the diff below allows it to
compile under blead (with the revert), and it then passes 18 of its 20
test scripts. I have no idea whether the two failing scripts represent a
"nearly there" state or a "fundamentally unfixable" state.



diff --git a/Coro-6.49/Coro/State.xs b/Coro-6.49/Coro/State.xs
index 6d631bd..c2cbe7b 100644
--- a/Coro-6.49/Coro/State.xs
+++ b/Coro-6.49/Coro/State.xs
@@ -1395,7 +1395,18 @@ runops_trace (pTHX)
                           PUSHMARK (SP);
                           PUSHs (&PL_sv_yes);
                           PUSHs (fullname);
-                          PUSHs (CxHASARGS (cx) ? sv_2mortal (newRV_inc ((SV *)cx->blk_sub.argarray)) : &PL_sv_undef);
+                          {
+                            AV *aa;
+# if PERL_VERSION_ATLEAST(5,23,8)
+                            aa = ((AV*)(AvARRAY(MUTABLE_AV(
+                                    PadlistARRAY(CvPADLIST(cx->blk_sub.cv))[
+                                    CvDEPTH(cx->blk_sub.cv)]))[0]));
+#else
+                            aa = cx->blk_sub.argarray;
+#endif
+
+                            PUSHs (CxHASARGS (cx) ? sv_2mortal (newRV_inc ((SV *)aa)) : &PL_sv_undef);
+                          }
                           PUTBACK;
                           cb = hv_fetch ((HV *)SvRV (coro_current), "_trace_sub_cb", sizeof ("_trace_sub_cb") - 1, 0);
                           if (cb) call_sv (*cb, G_KEEPERR | G_EVAL | G_VOID | G_DISCARD);




-- 
Indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victory
    -- Churchill on Montgomery

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About