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This API is used to facilitate safe pinned initialization of structs. It
replaces cumbersome `unsafe` manual initialization with elegant safe macro
invocations.
Due to the size of this change it has been split into six commits:
1. This commit introducing the basic public interface: traits and
functions to represent and create initializers.
2. Adds the `#[pin_data]`, `pin_init!`, `try_pin_init!`, `init!` and
`try_init!` macros along with their internal types.
3. Adds the `InPlaceInit` trait that allows using an initializer to create
an object inside of a `Box<T>` and other smart pointers.
4. Adds the `PinnedDrop` trait and adds macro support for it in
the `#[pin_data]` macro.
5. Adds the `stack_pin_init!` macro allowing to pin-initialize a struct on
the stack.
6. Adds the `Zeroable` trait and `init::zeroed` function to initialize
types that have `0x00` in all bytes as a valid bit pattern.
--
In this section the problem that the new pin-init API solves is outlined.
This message describes the entirety of the API, not just the parts
introduced in this commit. For a more granular explanation and additional
information on pinning and this issue, view [1].
Pinning is Rust's way of enforcing the address stability of a value. When a
value gets pinned it will be impossible for safe code to move it to another
location. This is done by wrapping pointers to said object with `Pin<P>`.
This wrapper prevents safe code from creating mutable references to the
object, preventing mutable access, which is needed to move the value.
`Pin<P>` provides `unsafe` functions to circumvent this and allow
modifications regardless. It is then the programmer's responsibility to
uphold the pinning guarantee.
Many kernel data structures require a stable address, because there are
foreign pointers to them which would get invalidated by moving the
structure. Since these data structures are usually embedded in structs to
use them, this pinning property propagates to the container struct.
Resulting in most structs in both Rust and C code needing to be pinned.
So if we want to have a `mutex` field in a Rust struct, this struct also
needs to be pinned, because a `mutex` contains a `list_head`. Additionally
initializing a `list_head` requires already having the final memory
location available, because it is initialized by pointing it to itself. But
this presents another challenge in Rust: values have to be initialized at
all times. There is the `MaybeUninit<T>` wrapper type, which allows
handling uninitialized memory, but this requires using the `unsafe` raw
pointers and a casting the type to the initialized variant.
This problem gets exacerbated when considering encapsulation and the normal
safety requirements of Rust code. The fields of the Rust `Mutex<T>` should
not be accessible to normal driver code. After all if anyone can modify
the fields, there is no way to ensure the invariants of the `Mutex<T>` are
upheld. But if the fields are inaccessible, then initialization of a
`Mutex<T>` needs to be somehow achieved via a function or a macro. Because
the `Mutex<T>` must be pinned in memory, the function cannot return it by
value. It also cannot allocate a `Box` to put the `Mutex<T>` into, because
that is an unnecessary allocation and indirection which would hurt
performance.
The solution in the rust tree (e.g. this commit: [2]) that is replaced by
this API is to split this function into two parts:
1. A `new` function that returns a partially initialized `Mutex<T>`,
2. An `init` function that requires the `Mutex<T>` to be pinned and that
fully initializes the `Mutex<T>`.
Both of these functions have to be marked `unsafe`, since a call to `new`
needs to be accompanied with a call to `init`, otherwise using the
`Mutex<T>` could result in UB. And because calling `init` twice also is not
safe. While `Mutex<T>` initialization cannot fail, other structs might
also have to allocate memory, which would result in conditional successful
initialization requiring even more manual accommodation work.
Combine this with the problem of pin-projections -- the way of accessing
fields of a pinned struct -- which also have an `unsafe` API, pinned
initialization is riddled with `unsafe` resulting in very poor ergonomics.
Not only that, but also having to call two functions possibly multiple
lines apart makes it very easy to forget it outright or during refactoring.
Here is an example of the current way of initializing a struct with two
synchronization primitives (see [3] for the full example):
struct SharedState {
state_changed: CondVar,
inner: Mutex<SharedStateInner>,
}
impl SharedState {
fn try_new() -> Result<Arc<Self>> {
let mut state = Pin::from(UniqueArc::try_new(Self {
// SAFETY: `condvar_init!` is called below.
state_changed: unsafe { CondVar::new() },
// SAFETY: `mutex_init!` is called below.
inner: unsafe {
Mutex::new(SharedStateInner { token_count: 0 })
},
})?);
// SAFETY: `state_changed` is pinned when `state` is.
let pinned = unsafe {
state.as_mut().map_unchecked_mut(|s| &mut s.state_changed)
};
kernel::condvar_init!(pinned, "SharedState::state_changed");
// SAFETY: `inner` is pinned when `state` is.
let pinned = unsafe {
state.as_mut().map_unchecked_mut(|s| &mut s.inner)
};
kernel::mutex_init!(pinned, "SharedState::inner");
Ok(state.into())
}
}
The pin-init API of this patch solves this issue by providing a
comprehensive solution comprised of macros and traits. Here is the example
from above using the pin-init API:
#[pin_data]
struct SharedState {
#[pin]
state_changed: CondVar,
#[pin]
inner: Mutex<SharedStateInner>,
}
impl SharedState {
fn new() -> impl PinInit<Self> {
pin_init!(Self {
state_changed <- new_condvar!("SharedState::state_changed"),
inner <- new_mutex!(
SharedStateInner { token_count: 0 },
"SharedState::inner",
),
})
}
}
Notably the way the macro is used here requires no `unsafe` and thus comes
with the usual Rust promise of safe code not introducing any memory
violations. Additionally it is now up to the caller of `new()` to decide
the memory location of the `SharedState`. They can choose at the moment
`Arc<T>`, `Box<T>` or the stack.
--
The API has the following architecture:
1. Initializer traits `PinInit<T, E>` and `Init<T, E>` that act like
closures.
2. Macros to create these initializer traits safely.
3. Functions to allow manually writing initializers.
The initializers (an `impl PinInit<T, E>`) receive a raw pointer pointing
to uninitialized memory and their job is to fully initialize a `T` at that
location. If initialization fails, they return an error (`E`) by value.
This way of initializing cannot be safely exposed to the user, since it
relies upon these properties outside of the control of the trait:
- the memory location (slot) needs to be valid memory,
- if initialization fails, the slot should not be read from,
- the value in the slot should be pinned, so it cannot move and the memory
cannot be deallocated until the value is dropped.
This is why using an initializer is facilitated by another trait that
ensures these requirements.
These initializers can be created manually by just supplying a closure that
fulfills the same safety requirements as `PinInit<T, E>`. But this is an
`unsafe` operation. To allow safe initializer creation, the `pin_init!` is
provided along with three other variants: `try_pin_init!`, `try_init!` and
`init!`. These take a modified struct initializer as a parameter and
generate a closure that initializes the fields in sequence.
The macros take great care in upholding the safety requirements:
- A shadowed struct type is used as the return type of the closure instead
of `()`. This is to prevent early returns, as these would prevent full
initialization.
- To ensure every field is only initialized once, a normal struct
initializer is placed in unreachable code. The type checker will emit
errors if a field is missing or specified multiple times.
- When initializing a field fails, the whole initializer will fail and
automatically drop fields that have been initialized earlier.
- Only the correct initializer type is allowed for unpinned fields. You
cannot use a `impl PinInit<T, E>` to initialize a structurally not pinned
field.
To ensure the last point, an additional macro `#[pin_data]` is needed. This
macro annotates the struct itself and the user specifies structurally
pinned and not pinned fields.
Because dropping a pinned struct is also not allowed to break the pinning
invariants, another macro attribute `#[pinned_drop]` is needed. This
macro is introduced in a following commit.
These two macros also have mechanisms to ensure the overall safety of the
API. Additionally, they utilize a combined proc-macro, declarative macro
design: first a proc-macro enables the outer attribute syntax `#[...]` and
does some important pre-parsing. Notably this prepares the generics such
that the declarative macro can handle them using token trees. Then the
actual parsing of the structure and the emission of code is handled by a
declarative macro.
For pin-projections the crates `pin-project` [4] and `pin-project-lite` [5]
had been considered, but were ultimately rejected:
- `pin-project` depends on `syn` [6] which is a very big dependency, around
50k lines of code.
- `pin-project-lite` is a more reasonable 5k lines of code, but contains a
very complex declarative macro to parse generics. On top of that it
would require modification that would need to be maintained
independently.
Link: https://rust-for-linux.com/the-safe-pinned-initialization-problem [1]
Link:
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|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| alloc | ||
| bindings | ||
| kernel | ||
| macros | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| bindgen_parameters | ||
| build_error.rs | ||
| compiler_builtins.rs | ||
| exports.c | ||
| helpers.c | ||
| Makefile | ||