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NuttX TODO List (Last updated November 26, 2020)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This file summarizes known NuttX bugs, limitations, inconsistencies with
standards, things that could be improved, and ideas for enhancements. This
TODO list does not include issues associated with individual board ports. See
also the individual README.txt files in the boards/ sub-directories for
issues related to each board port.
nuttx/:
(16) Task/Scheduler (sched/)
(2) SMP
(1) Memory Management (mm/)
(0) Power Management (drivers/pm)
(5) Signals (sched/signal, arch/)
(2) pthreads (sched/pthread, libs/libc/pthread)
(0) Message Queues (sched/mqueue)
(1) Work Queues (sched/wqueue)
(6) Kernel/Protected Build
(2) C++ Support
(5) Binary loaders (binfmt/)
(17) Network (net/, drivers/net)
(4) USB (drivers/usbdev, drivers/usbhost)
(2) Other drivers (drivers/)
(9) Libraries (libs/libc/, libs/libm/)
(12) File system/Generic drivers (fs/, drivers/)
(10) Graphics Subsystem (graphics/)
(1) Build system / Toolchains
(2) Linux/Cygwin simulation (arch/sim)
(5) ARM (arch/arm/)
apps/ and other Add-Ons:
(1) Network Utilities (apps/netutils/)
(1) NuttShell (NSH) (apps/nshlib)
(2) System libraries apps/system (apps/system)
(1) Modbus (apps/modbus)
(5) Other Applications & Tests (apps/examples/)
o Task/Scheduler (sched/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: CHILD PTHREAD TERMINATION
Description: When a tasks exits, shouldn't all of its child pthreads also be
terminated?
This behavior was implemented as an options controlled by the
configuration setting CONFIG_SCHED_EXIT_KILL_CHILDREN. This
option must be used with caution, however. It should not be
used unless you are certain of what you are doing. Uninformed
of this option can often lead to memory leaks since, for
example, memory allocations held by threads are not
automatically freed!
Status: Closed. No, this behavior will not be implemented unless
specifically selected.
Priority: Medium, required for good emulation of process/pthread model.
The current behavior allows for the main thread of a task to
exit() and any child pthreads will persist. That does raise
some issues: The main thread is treated much like just-another-
pthread but must follow the semantics of a task or a process.
That results in some inconsistencies (for example, with robust
mutexes, what should happen if the main thread exits while
holding a mutex?)
Title: pause() NON-COMPLIANCE
Description: In the POSIX description of this function the pause() function
must suspend the calling thread until delivery of a signal whose
action is either to execute a signal-catching function or to
terminate the process. The current implementation only waits for
any non-blocked signal to be received. It should only wake up if
the signal is delivered to a handler.
Status: Open.
Priority: Medium Low.
Title: ON-DEMAND PAGING INCOMPLETE
Description: On-demand paging has recently been incorporated into the RTOS.
The design of this feature is described here:
https://nuttx.apache.org/docs/latest/components/paging.html.
As of this writing, the basic feature implementation is
complete and much of the logic has been verified. The test
harness for the feature exists only for the NXP LPC3131 (see
boards/arm/lpc31xx/ea3131/configs/pgnsh and locked
directories). There are some limitations of this testing so
I still cannot say that the feature is fully functional.
Status: Open. This has been put on the shelf for some time.
Priority: Medium-Low
Title: GET_ENVIRON_PTR()
Description: get_environ_ptr() (sched/sched_getenvironptr.c) is not implemented.
The representation of the environment strings selected for
NuttX is not compatible with the operation. Some significant
re-design would be required to implement this function and that
effort is thought to be not worth the result.
Status: Open. No change is planned.
Priority: Low -- There is no plan to implement this.
Title: TIMER_GETOVERRUN()
Description: timer_getoverrun() (sched/timer_getoverrun.c) is not implemented.
Status: Open
Priority: Low -- There is no plan to implement this.
Title: INCOMPATIBILITIES WITH execv() AND execl()
Description: Simplified 'execl()' and 'execv()' functions are provided by
NuttX. NuttX does not support processes and hence the concept
of overlaying a tasks process image with a new process image
does not make any sense. In NuttX, these functions are
wrapper functions that:
1. Call the non-standard binfmt function 'exec', and then
2. exit(0).
As a result, the current implementations of 'execl()' and
'execv()' suffer from some incompatibilities, the most
serious of these is that the exec'ed task will not have
the same task ID as the vfork'ed function. So the parent
function cannot know the ID of the exec'ed task.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium Low for now
Title: ISSUES WITH atexit(), on_exit(), AND pthread_cleanup_pop()
Description: These functions execute with the following bad properties:
1. They run with interrupts disabled,
2. They run in supervisor mode (if applicable), and
3. They do not obey any setup of PIC or address
environments. Do they need to?
4. In the case of task_delete() and pthread_cancel() without
deferred cancellation, these callbacks will run on the
thread of execution and address context of the caller of
task_delete() or pthread_cancel(). That is very bad!
The fix for all of these issues it to have the callbacks
run on the caller's thread as is currently done with
signal handlers. Signals are delivered differently in
PROTECTED and KERNEL modes: The delivery involves a
signal handling trampoline function in the user address
space and two signal handlers: One to call the signal
handler trampoline in user mode (SYS_signal_handler) and
on in with the signal handler trampoline to return to
supervisor mode (SYS_signal_handler_return)
The primary difference is in the location of the signal
handling trampoline:
- In PROTECTED mode, there is on a single user space blob
with a header at the beginning of the block (at a well-
known location. There is a pointer to the signal handler
trampoline function in that header.
- In the KERNEL mode, a special process signal handler
trampoline is used at a well-known location in every
process address space (ARCH_DATA_RESERVE->ar_sigtramp).
Status: Open
Priority: Medium Low. This is an important change to some less
important interfaces. For the average user, these
functions are just fine the way they are.
Title: execv() AND vfork()
Description: There is a problem when vfork() calls execv() (or execl()) to
start a new application: When the parent thread calls vfork()
it receives and gets the pid of the vforked task, and *not*
the pid of the desired execv'ed application.
The same tasking arrangement is used by the standard function
posix_spawn(). However, posix_spawn uses the non-standard, internal
NuttX interface task_reparent() to replace the child's parent task
with the caller of posix_spawn(). That cannot be done with vfork()
because we don't know what vfork() is going to do.
Any solution to this is either very difficult or impossible without
an MMU.
Status: Open
Priority: Low (it might as well be low since it isn't going to be fixed).
Title: errno IS NOT SHARED AMONG THREADS
Description: In NuttX, the errno value is unique for each thread. But for
bug-for-bug compatibility, the same errno should be shared by
the task and each thread that it creates. It is *very* easy
to make this change: Just move the tls_errno field from
struct tls_info_s to struct task_group_s. However, I am still
not sure if this should be done or not.
NOTE: glibc behaves this way unless __thread is defined then,
in that case, it behaves like NuttX (using TLS to save the
thread local errno).
Status: Closed. The existing solution is better and compatible with
thread-aware GLIBC (although its incompatibilities could show
up in porting some code). I will retain this issue for
reference only.
Priority: N/A
Title: SCALABILITY
Description: Task control information is retained in simple lists. This
is completely appropriate for small embedded systems where
the number of tasks, N, is relatively small. Most list
operations are O(N). This could become an issue if N gets
very large.
In that case, these simple lists should be replaced with
something more performant such as a balanced tree in the
case of ordered lists. Fortunately, most internal lists are
hidden behind simple accessor functions and so the internal
data structures can be changed if need with very little impact.
Explicitly reference to the list structure are hidden behind
the macro this_task().
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Things are just the way that we want them for the way
that NuttX is used today.
Title: INTERNAL VERSIONS OF USER FUNCTIONS
Description: The internal NuttX logic uses the same interfaces as does
the application. That sometime produces a problem because
there is "overloaded" functionality in those user interfaces
that are not desirable.
For example, having cancellation points hidden inside of the
OS can cause non-cancellation point interfaces to behave
strangely.
Here is another issue: Internal OS functions should not set
errno and should never have to look at the errno value to
determine the cause of the failure. The errno is provided
for compatibility with POSIX application interface
requirements and really doesn't need to be used within the
OS.
Both of these could be fixed if there were special internal
versions these functions. For example, there could be a an
nxsem_wait() that does all of the same things as sem_wait()
was does not create a cancellation point and does not set
the errno value on failures.
Everything inside the OS would use nx_sem_wait().
Applications would call sem_wait() which would just be a
wrapper around nx_sem_wait() that adds the cancellation point
and that sets the errno value on failures.
On particularly difficult issue is the use of common memory
manager C, and NX libraries in the build. For the PROTECTED
and KERNEL builds, this issue is resolved. In that case,
The OS links with a different version of the libraries than
does the application: The OS version would use the OS internal
interfaces and the application would use the standard
interfaces.
But for the FLAT build, both the OS and the applications use
the same library functions. For applications, the library
functions *must* support errno's and cancellation and, hence,
these are also used within the OS.
But that raises yet another issue: If the application
version of the libraries use the standard interfaces
internally, then they may generate unexpected cancellation
points. For example, the memory management would take a
semaphore using sem_wait() to get exclusive access to the
heap. That means that every call to malloc() and free()
would be a cancellation point, a clear POSIX violation.
Changes like that could clean up some of this internal
craziness.
UPDATE:
2017-10-03: This change has been completed for the case of
semaphores used in the OS. Still need to checkout signals
and messages queues that are also used in the OS. Also
backed out commit b4747286b19d3b15193b2a5e8a0fe48fa0a8638c.
2017-10-06: This change has been completed for the case of
signals used in the OS. Still need to checkout messages
queues that are also used in the OS.
2017-10-10: This change has been completed for the case of
message queue used in the OS. I am keeping this issue
open because (1) there are some known remaining calls that
that will modify the errno (such as dup(), dup2(),
nxtask_activate(), kthread_create(), exec(), mq_open(),
mq_close(), and others) and (2) there may still be calls that
create cancellation points. Need to check things like open(),
close(), read(), write(), and possibly others.
2018-01-30: This change has been completed for the case of
scheduler functions used within the OS: sched_getparam(),
sched_setparam(), sched_getscheduler(), sched_setschedule(),
and sched_setaffinity(),
2018-09-15: This change has been completed for the case of
open() used within the OS. There are places under libs/ and
boards/ that have not been converted. I also note cases
where fopen() is called under libs/libc/netdb/.
2019-09-11: built_isavail() no longer sets the errno variable.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Things are working OK the way they are. But the design
could be improved and made a little more efficient with this
change.
Task: IDLE THREAD TCB SETUP
Description: There are issues with setting IDLE thread stacks:
The problem is colorizing that stack to use with stack usage
monitoring logic. There is logic in some start functions to
do this in a function called go_nx_start.
It is available in these architectures:
./arm/src/efm32/efm32_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/kinetis/kinetis_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/sam34/sam_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/samv7/sam_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/stm32/stm32_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/stm32f7/stm32_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/stm32l4/stm32l4_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/tms570/tms570_boot.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
./arm/src/xmc4/xmc4_start.c:static void go_nx_start(void *pv, unsigned int nbytes)
But no others.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, only needed for more complete debug.
Title: PRIORITY INHERITANCE WITH SPORADIC SCHEDULER
Description: The sporadic scheduler manages CPU utilization by a task by
alternating between a high and a low priority. In either
state, it may have its priority boosted. However, under
some circumstances, it is impossible in the current design to
switch to the correct priority if a semaphore held by the
sporadic thread is participating in priority inheritance:
There is an issue when switching from the high to the low
priority state. If the priority was NOT boosted above the
higher priority, it still may still need to boosted with
respect to the lower priority. If the highest priority
thread waiting on a semaphore held by the sporadic thread is
higher in priority than the low priority but less than the
higher priority, then new thread priority should be set to
that middle priority, not to the lower priority.
In order to do this we would need to know the highest
priority from among all tasks waiting for the all semaphores
held by the sporadic task. That information could be
retained by the priority inheritance logic for use by the
sporadic scheduler. The boost priority could be retained in
a new field of the TCB (say, pend_priority). That
pend_priority could then be used when switching from the
higher to the lower priority.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Does anyone actually use the sporadic scheduler?
Title: SIMPLIFY SPORADIC SCHEDULER DESIGN
Description: I have been planning to re-implement sporadic scheduling for
some time. I believe that the current implementation is
unnecessarily complex. There is no clear statement for the
requirements of sporadic scheduling that I could find, so I
based the design on some behaviors of another OS that I saw
published (QNX as I recall).
But I think that the bottom line requirement for sporadic
scheduling is that is it should make a best attempt to
control a fixed percentage of CPU bandwidth for a task in
during an interval only by modifying it is priority between
a low and a high priority. The current design involves
several timers: A "budget" timer plus a variable number of
"replenishment" timers and a lot of nonsense to duplicate QNX
behavior that I think I not necessary.
It think that the sporadic scheduler could be re-implemented
with only the single "budget" timer. Instead of starting a
new "replenishment" timer when the task is resumed, that
single timer could just be extended.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This is an enhancement. And does anyone actually use
the sporadic scheduler?
Title: REMOVE NESTED CANCELLATION POINT SUPPORT
Description: The current implementation support nested cancellation points.
The TCB field cpcount keeps track of that nesting level.
However, cancellation points should not be calling other
cancellation points so this design could be simplified by
removing all support for nested cancellation points.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. No harm is being done by the current implementation.
This change is primarily for aesthetic reasons. If would
reduce memory usage by a very small but probably
insignificant amount.
Title: DAEMONIZE ELF PROGRAM
Description: It is a common practice to "daemonize" to detach a task from
its parent. This is used with NSH, for example, so that NSH
will not stall, waiting in waitpid() for the child task to
exit.
Daemonization is done to creating a new task which continues
to run while the original task exits (sending the SIGCHLD
signal to the parent and awakening waitpid()). In a pure
POSIX system, this is down with fork(), perhaps like:
if (fork() != 0)
{
exit();
}
but is usually done with task_create() in NuttX. But when
task_create() is called from within an ELF program, a very
perverse situation is created:
The basic problem involves address environments and task groups:
"Task groups" are emulations of Linux processes. For the
case of the FLAT, ELF module, the address environment is
allocated memory that contains the ELF module.
When you call task_create() from the ELF program, you now
have two task groups running in the same address environment.
That is a perverse situation for which there is no standard
solution. There is nothing comparable to that. Even in
Linux, fork() creates another address environment (although
it is an exact copy of the original).
When the ELF program was created, the function exec() in
binfmt/binfmt_exec.c runs. It sets up a call back that will
be invoked when the ELF program exits.
When ELF program exits, the address environment is destroyed
and the other task running in the same address environment is
then running in stale memory and will eventually crash.
Nothing special happens when the other created task running
in the allocated address environment exits since has no such
call backs.
In order to make this work you would need logic like:
1. When the ELF task calls task_create(), it would need to:
a. Detect that task_create() was called from an ELF program,
b. increment a reference count on the address environment, and
c. Set up the same exit hook for the newly created task.
2. Then when either the ELF program task or the created task
in the same address environment exits, it would decrement
the reference count. When the last task exits, the reference
count would go to zero and the address environment could be
destroyed.
This is complex work and would take some effort and probably
requires redesign of existing code and interfaces to get a
proper, clean, modular solution.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-Low. A simple work-arounds when using NSH is to use
the '&' postfix to put the started ELF program into background.
o SMP
^^^
Title: MISUSE OF sched_lock() IN SMP MODE
Description: The OS API sched_lock() disables pre-emption and locks a
task in place. In the single CPU case, it is also often
used to enforce a simple critical section since not other
task can run while pre-emption is locked.
This, however, does not generalize to the SMP case. In the
SMP case, there are multiple tasks running on multiple CPUs.
The basic behavior is still correct: The task that has
locked pre-emption will not be suspended. However, there
is no longer any protection for use as a critical section:
tasks running on other CPUs may still execute that
unprotected code region.
The solution is to replace the use of sched_lock() with
stronger protection such as spin_lock_irqsave().
Status: Open
Priority: Medium for SMP system. Not critical to single CPU systems.
NOTE: There are no known bugs from this potential problem.
Title: ISSUES WITH ACCESSING CPU INDEX
Description: The CPU number is accessed usually with the macro this_cpu().
The returned CPU number is then used for various things,
typically as an array index. However, if pre-emption is
not disabled,then it is possible that a context switch
could occur and that logic could run on another CPU with
possible fatal consequences.
We need to evaluate all use of this_cpu() and assure that
it is used in a way that guarantees the the code continues
to execute on the same CPU.
Status: Open
Prioity: Medium. This is a logical problem but I have never seen
an bugs caused by this. But I believe that failures are
possible.
o Memory Management (mm/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: FREE MEMORY ON TASK EXIT
Description: Add an option to free all memory allocated by a task when the
task exits. This is probably not be worth the overhead for a
deeply embedded system.
There would be complexities with this implementation as well
because often one task allocates memory and then passes the
memory to another: The task that "owns" the memory may not
be the same as the task that allocated the memory.
Update. From the NuttX forum:
...there is a good reason why task A should never delete task B.
That is because you will strand memory resources. Another feature
lacking in most flat address space RTOSs is automatic memory
clean-up when a task exits.
That behavior just comes for free in a process-based OS like Linux:
Each process has its own heap and when you tear down the process
environment, you naturally destroy the heap too.
But RTOSs have only a single, shared heap. I have spent some time
thinking about how you could clean up memory required by a task
when a task exits. It is not so simple. It is not as simple as
just keeping memory allocated by a thread in a list then freeing
the list of allocations when the task exists.
It is not that simple because you don't know how the memory is
being used. For example, if task A allocates memory that is used
by task B, then when task A exits, you would not want to free that
memory needed by task B. In a process-based system, you would
have to explicitly map shared memory (with reference counting) in
order to share memory. So the life of shared memory in that
environment is easily managed.
I have thought that the way that this could be solved in NuttX
would be: (1) add links and reference counts to all memory allocated
by a thread. This would increase the memory allocation overhead!
(2) Keep the list head in the TCB, and (3) extend mmap() and munmap()
to include the shared memory operations (which would only manage
the reference counting and the life of the allocation).
Then what about pthreads? Memory should not be freed until the last
pthread in the group exists. That could be done with an additional
reference count on the whole allocated memory list (just as streams
and file descriptors are now shared and persist until the last
pthread exits).
I think that would work but to me is very unattractive and
inconsistent with the NuttX "small footprint" objective. ...
Other issues:
- Memory free time would go up because you would have to remove
the memory from that list in free().
- There are special cases inside the RTOS itself. For example,
if task A creates task B, then initial memory allocations for
task B are created by task A. Some special allocators would
be required to keep this memory on the correct list (or on
no list at all).
Updated 2016-06-25:
For processors with an MMU (Memory Management Unit), NuttX can be
built in a kernel mode. In that case, each process will have a
local copy of its heap (filled with sbrk()) and when the process
exits, its local heap will be destroyed and the underlying page
memory is recovered.
So in this case, NuttX work just link Linux or or *nix systems:
All memory allocated by processes or threads in processes will
be recovered when the process exits.
But not for the flat memory build. In that case, the issues
above do apply. There is no safe way to recover the memory in
that case (and even if there were, the additional overhead would
not be acceptable on most platforms).
This does not prohibit anyone from creating a wrapper for malloc()
and an atexit() callback that frees memory on task exit. People
are free and, in fact, encouraged, to do that. However, since
it is inherently unsafe, I would never incorporate anything
like that into NuttX.
Status: Open. No changes are planned. NOTE: This applies to the FLAT
and PROTECTED builds only. There is no such leaking of memory
in the KERNEL build mode.
Priority: Medium/Low, a good feature to prevent memory leaks but would
have negative impact on memory usage and code size.
o Power Management (drivers/pm)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
o Signals (sched/signal, arch/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: STANDARD SIGNALS
Description: 'Standard' signals and signal actions are not fully
supported. The SIGCHLD signal is supported and, if the
option CONFIG_SIG_DEFAULT=y is included, some signals will
perform their default actions (dependent upon addition
configuration settings):
Signal Action Additional Configuration
------- -------------------- -------------------------
SIGUSR1 Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGUSR1_ACTION
SIGUSR2 Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGUSR2_ACTION
SIGALRM Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGALRM_ACTION
SIGPOLL Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGPOLL_ACTION
SIGSTOP Suspend task CONFIG_SIG_SIGSTOP_ACTION
SIGTSTP Suspend task CONFIG_SIG_SIGSTOP_ACTION
SIGCONT Resume task CONFIG_SIG_SIGSTOP_ACTION
SIGINT Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGKILL_ACTION
SIGKILL Abnormal Termination CONFIG_SIG_SIGKILL_ACTION
Status: Open. No further changes are planned.
Priority: Low, required by standards but not so critical for an
embedded system.
Title: SIGEV_THREAD
Description: Implementation of support for SIGEV_THREAD is available
only in the FLAT build mode because it uses the OS work queues to
perform the callback. The alternative for the PROTECTED and KERNEL
builds would be to create pthreads in the user space to perform the
callbacks. That is not a very attractive solution due to performance
issues. It would also require some additional logic to specify the
TCB of the parent so that the pthread could be bound to the correct
group.
There is also some user-space logic in libs/libc/aio/lio_listio.c.
That logic could use the user-space work queue for the callbacks.
Status: Low, there are alternative designs. However, these features
are required by the POSIX standard.
Priority: Low for now
Title: SIGNAL NUMBERING
Description: In signal.h, the range of valid signals is listed as 0-31. However,
in many interfaces, 0 is not a valid signal number. The valid
signal number should be 1-32. The signal set operations would need
to map bits appropriately.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Even if there are only 31 usable signals, that is still a lot.
Title: NO QUEUING of SIGNAL ACTIONS
Description: In the architecture specific implementation of struct xcptcontext,
there are fields used by signal handling logic to pass the state
information needed to dispatch signal actions to the appropriate
handler.
There is only one copy of this state information in the
implementations of struct xcptcontext and, as a consequence,
if there is a signal handler executing on a thread, then addition
signal actions will be lost until that signal handler completes
and releases those resources.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This design flaw has been around for ages and no one has yet
complained about it. Apparently the visibility of the problem is
very low.
Title: QUEUED SIGNAL ACTIONS ARE INAPPROPRIATELY DEFERRED
Description: The implement of nxsig_deliver() does the following in a loop:
- It takes the next next queued signal action from a list
- Calls the architecture-specific up_sigdeliver() to perform
the signal action (through some sleight of hand in
up_schedule_sigaction())
- up_sigdeliver() is a trampoline function that performs the
actual signal action as well as some housekeeping functions
then
- up_sigdeliver() performs a context switch back to the normal,
uninterrupted thread instead of returning to nxsig_deliver().
The loop in nxsig_deliver() then will have the opportunity to
run until when that normal, uninterrupted thread is suspended.
Then the loop will continue with the next queued signal
action.
Normally signals execute immediately. The is the whole reason
why almost all blocking APIs return when a signal is received
(with errno equal to EINTR).
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This design flaw has been around for ages and no one has yet
complained about it. Apparently the visibility of the problem is
very low.
o pthreads (sched/pthreads libs/libc/pthread)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: PTHREAD_PRIO_PROTECT
Description: Extend pthread_mutexattr_setprotocol(). It should support
PTHREAD_PRIO_PROTECT (and so should its non-standard counterpart
sem_setproto()).
"When a thread owns one or more mutexes initialized with the
PTHREAD_PRIO_PROTECT protocol, it shall execute at the higher of its
priority or the highest of the priority ceilings of all the mutexes
owned by this thread and initialized with this attribute, regardless of
whether other threads are blocked on any of these mutexes or not.
"While a thread is holding a mutex which has been initialized with
the PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT or PTHREAD_PRIO_PROTECT protocol attributes,
it shall not be subject to being moved to the tail of the scheduling queue
at its priority in the event that its original priority is changed,
such as by a call to sched_setparam(). Likewise, when a thread unlocks
a mutex that has been initialized with the PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT or
PTHREAD_PRIO_PROTECT protocol attributes, it shall not be subject to
being moved to the tail of the scheduling queue at its priority in the
event that its original priority is changed."
Status: Open. No changes planned.
Priority: Low -- about zero, probably not that useful. Priority inheritance is
already supported and is a much better solution. And it turns out
that priority protection is just about as complex as priority inheritance.
Excerpted from my post in a Linked-In discussion:
"I started to implement this HLS/"PCP" semaphore in an RTOS that I
work with (https://apache.nuttx.org) and I discovered after doing the
analysis and basic code framework that a complete solution for the
case of a counting semaphore is still quite complex -- essentially
as complex as is priority inheritance.
"For example, suppose that a thread takes 3 different HLS semaphores
A, B, and C. Suppose that they are prioritized in that order with
A the lowest and C the highest. Suppose the thread takes 5 counts
from A, 3 counts from B, and 2 counts from C. What priority should
it run at? It would have to run at the priority of the highest
priority semaphore C. This means that the RTOS must maintain
internal information of the priority of every semaphore held by
the thread.
"Now suppose it releases one count on semaphore B. How does the
RTOS know that it still holds 2 counts on B? With some complex
internal data structure. The RTOS would have to maintain internal
information about how many counts from each semaphore are held
by each thread.
"How does the RTOS know that it should not decrement the priority
from the priority of C? Again, only with internal complexity. It
would have to know the priority of every semaphore held by
every thread.
"Providing the HLS capability on a simple pthread mutex would not
be such quite such a complex job if you allow only one mutex per
thread. However, the more general case seems almost as complex
as priority inheritance. I decided that the implementation does
not have value to me. I only wanted it for its reduced
complexity; in all other ways I believe that it is the inferior
solution. So I discarded a few hours of programming. Not a
big loss from the experience I gained."
Title: INAPPROPRIATE USE OF sched_lock() BY pthreads
Description: In implementation of standard pthread functions, the non-
standard, NuttX function sched_lock() is used. This is very
strong since it disables pre-emption for all threads in all
task groups. I believe it is only really necessary in most
cases to lock threads in the task group with a new non-
standard interface, say pthread_lock().
This is because the OS resources used by a thread such as
mutexes, condition variable, barriers, etc. are only
meaningful from within the task group. So, in order to
performance exclusive operations on these resources, it is
only necessary to block other threads executing within the
task group.
This is an easy change: pthread_lock() and pthread_unlock()
would simply operate on a semaphore retained in the task
group structure. I am, however, hesitant to make this change:
In the FLAT build model, there is nothing that prevents people
from accessing the inter-thread controls from threads in
different task groups. Making this change, while correct,
might introduce subtle bugs in code by people who are not
using NuttX correctly.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This change would improve real-time performance of the
OS but is not otherwise required.
o Message Queues (sched/mqueue)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
o Work Queues (sched/wqueue)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: WORK QUEUE DELAY INACCURACIES
Description: Each queued work may have an optional delay value associated
with it. That delay should be respect to the time that the
work is queued. However, since we do not know the time the
work is queue, the actual delay will be respect to the time
that the work is processed. Under certain conditions, the
work may sit in the queue for some time before it is
processed, leading to an inaccuracy in the delay.
One solution might involved saving the time when in the work
structure when the work is queued. Then the delay logic can
take the difference between the processing time and the
queued time to get a more accurate delay.
Status: Open
Priority: In all known use cased, the priority is low. A problem is
would only occur if the work queue is overload or if work in
the work queue suspends waiting for a resource (both of which
are much bigger problems).
o Kernel/Protected Build
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: C++ CONSTRUCTORS HAVE TOO MANY PRIVILEGES (PROTECTED MODE)
Description: When a C++ ELF module is loaded, its C++ constructors are called
via sched/task_starthook.c logic. This logic runs in protected mode.
The is a security hole because the user code runs with kernel-
privileges when the constructor executes.
Destructors likely have the opposite problem. The probably try to
execute some kernel logic in user mode? Obviously this needs to
be investigated further.
Status: Open
Priority: Low (unless you need build a secure C++ system).
Title: TOO MANY SYSCALLS
Description: There are a few syscalls that operate very often in user space.
Since syscalls are (relatively) time consuming this could be
a performance issue. Here is some numbers that I collected
in an application that was doing mostly printf output:
sem_post - 18% of syscalls
sem_wait - 18% of syscalls
getpid - 59% of syscalls
--------------------------
95% of syscalls
Obviously system performance could be improved greatly by simply
optimizing these functions so that they do not need to system calls
so frequently. This getpid() call is part of the re-entrant
semaphore logic used with printf() and other C buffered I/O.
Something like TLS might be used to retain the thread's ID
locally.
Linux, for example, has functions call up() and down(). up()
increments the semaphore count but does not call into the kernel
unless incrementing the count unblocks a task; similarly, down
decrements the count and does not call into the kernel unless
the count becomes negative the caller must be blocked.
Update:
"I am thinking that there should be a "magic" global, user-
accessible variable that holds the PID of the currently
executing thread; basically the PID of the task at the head
of the ready-to-run list. This variable would have to be reset
each time the head of the ready-to-run list changes.
"Then getpid() could be implemented in user space with no system call
by simply reading this variable.
"This one would be easy: Just a change to include/nuttx/userspace.h,
boards/<arch>/<chip>/<board>/kernel/up_userspace.c, libs/libc/,
sched/sched_addreadytorun.c, and sched/sched_removereadytorun.c.
That would eliminate 59% of the syscalls."
Update:
This is probably also just a symptom of the OS test that does mostly
console output. The requests for the pid() are part of the
implementation of the I/O's re-entrant semaphore implementation and
would not be an issue in the more general case.
Update:
One solution might be to use TLS, add the PID to struct
tls_info_s. Then the PID could be obtained without a system call.
TLS is not very useful in the FLAT build, however. TLS works by
putting per-thread data at the bottom of an aligned stack. The
current stack pointer is then ANDed with the alignment mask to
obtain the per-thread data address.
There are problems with this in the FLAT and PROTECTED builds:
First the maximum size of the stack is limited by the number
of bits in the mask. This means that you need to have a very
high alignment to support tasks with large stacks. But
secondly, the higher the alignment of the stacks stacks, the
more memory is lost to fragmentation.
In the KERNEL build, the the stack lies at a virtual address
and it is possible to have highly aligned stacks with no such
penalties.
Status: Open
Priority: Low-Medium. Right now, I do not know if these syscalls are a
real performance issue or not. The above statistics were collected
from a an atypical application (the OS test), and does an excessive
amount of console output. There is probably no issue with more typical
embedded applications.
Title: SECURITY ISSUES
Description: In the current designed, the kernel code calls into the user-space
allocators to allocate user-space memory. It is a security risk to
call into user-space in kernel-mode because that could be exploited
to gain control of the system. That could be fixed by dropping to
user mode before trapping into the memory allocators; the memory
allocators would then need to trap in order to return (this is
already done to return from signal handlers; that logic could be
renamed more generally and just used for a generic return trap).
Another place where the system calls into the user code in kernel
mode is work_usrstart() to start the user work queue. That is
another security hole that should be plugged.
Status: Open
Priority: Low (unless security becomes an issue).
Title: MICRO-KERNEL
Description: The initial kernel build cut many interfaces at a very high level.
The resulting monolithic kernel is then rather large. It would
not be a prohibitively large task to reorganize the interfaces so
that NuttX is built as a micro-kernel, i.e., with only the core
OS services within the kernel and with other OS facilities, such
as the file system, message queues, etc., residing in user-space
and to interfacing with those core OS facilities through traps.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This is a good idea and certainly an architectural
improvement. However, there is no strong motivation now do
do that partitioning work.
Title: USER MODE TASKS CAN MODIFY PRIVILEGED TASKS
Description: Certain interfaces, such as sched_setparam(),
sched_setscheduler(), etc. can be used by user mode tasks to
modify the behavior of privileged kernel threads.
For a truly secure system. Privileges need to be checked in
every interface that permits one thread to modify the
properties of another thread.
NOTE: It would be a simple matter to simply disable user
threads from modifying privileged threads. However, you
might also want to be able to modify privileged threads from
user tasks with certain permissions. Permissions is a much
more complex issue.
task_delete(), for example, is not permitted to kill a kernel
thread. But should not a privileged user task be able to do
so?
Status: Open
Priority: Low for most embedded systems but would be a critical need if
NuttX were used in a secure system.
Title: SIGNAL ACTION VULNERABILITY
Description: When a signal action is performed, the user stack is used.
Unlike Linux, applications do not have separate user and
supervisor stacks; everything is done on the user stack.
In the implementation of up_sigdeliver(), a copy of the
register contents that will be restored is present on the
stack and could be modified by the user application. Thus,
if the user mucks with the return stack, problems could
occur when the user task returns to supervisor mode from
the the signal handler.
A recent commit (3 Feb 2019) does protect the status register
and return address so that a malicious task cannot change the
return address or switch to supervisor mode. Other register
are still modifiable so there is other possible mayhem that
could be done.
A better solution, in lieu of a kernel stack, would be to
eliminate the stack-based register save area altogether and,
instead, save the registers in another, dedicated state save
area in the TCB. The only hesitation to this option is that
it would significantly increase the size of the TCB structure
and, hence, the per-thread memory overhead.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-ish if are attempting to make a secure environment that
may host malicious code. Very low for the typical FLAT build,
however.
o C++ Support
^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: STATIC CONSTRUCTORS AND MULTITASKING
Description: The logic that calls static constructors operates on the main
thread of the initial user application task. Any static
constructors that cache task/thread specific information such
as C streams or file descriptors will not work in other tasks.
See also UCLIBC++ AND STATIC CONSTRUCTORS below.
Status: Open
Priority: Low and probably will not changed. In these case, there will
need to be an application specific solution.
Title: UCLIBC++ AND STATIC CONSTRUCTORS
uClibc++ was designed to work in a Unix environment with
processes and with separately linked executables. Each process
has its own, separate uClibc++ state. uClibc++ would be
instantiated like this in Linux:
1) When the program is built, a tiny start-up function is
included at the beginning of the program. Each program has
its own, separate list of C++ constructors.
2) When the program is loaded into memory, space is set aside
for uClibc's static objects and then this special start-up
routine is called. It initializes the C library, calls all
of the constructors, and calls atexit() so that the destructors
will be called when the process exits.
In this way, you get a per-process uClibc++ state since there
is per-process storage of uClibc++ global state and per-process
initialization of uClibc++ state.
Compare this to how NuttX (and most embedded RTOSs) would work:
1) The entire FLASH image is built as one big blob. All of the
constructors are lumped together and all called together at
one time.
This, of course, does not have to be so. We could segregate
constructors by some criteria and we could use a task start
up routine to call constructors separately. We could even
use ELF executables that are separately linked and already
have their constructors separately called when the ELF
executable starts.
But this would not do you very much good in the case of
uClibc++ because:
2) NuttX does not support processes, i.e., separate address
environments for each task. As a result, the scope of global
data is all tasks. Any change to the global state made by
one task can effect another task. There can only one
uClibc++ state and it will be shared by all tasks. uClibc++
apparently relies on global instances (at least for cin and
cout) there is no way to have any unique state for any
"task group".
[NuttX does not support processes because in order to have
true processes, your hardware must support a memory management
unit (MMU) and I am not aware of any mainstream MCU that has
an MMU (or, at least an MMU that is capable enough to support
processes).]
NuttX does not have processes, but it does have "task groups".
See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NUTTX/Tasks+vs.+Threads+FAQ.
A task group is the task plus all of the pthreads created by
the task via pthread_create(). Resources like FILE streams
are shared within a task group. Task groups are like a poor
man's process.
This means that if the uClibc++ static classes are initialized
by one member of a task group, then cin/cout should work
correctly with all threads that are members of task group. The
destructors would be called when the final member of the task
group exists (if registered via atexit()).
So if you use only pthreads, uClibc++ should work very much like
it does in Linux. If your NuttX usage model is like one process
with many threads then you have Linux compatibility.
If you wanted to have uClibc++ work across task groups, then
uClibc++ and NuttX would need some extensions. I am thinking
along the lines of the following:
1) There is a per-task group storage are within the RTOS (see
include/nuttx/sched.h). If we add some new, non-standard APIs
then uClibc++ could get access to per-task group storage (in
the spirit of pthread_getspecific() which gives you access to
per-thread storage).
2) Then move all of uClibc++'s global state into per-task group
storage and add a uClibc++ initialization function that would:
a) allocate per-task group storage, b) call all of the static
constructors, and c) register with atexit() to perform clean-
up when the task group exits.
That would be a fair amount of effort. I don't really know what
the scope of such an effort would be. I suspect that it is not
large but probably complex.
NOTES:
1) See STATIC CONSTRUCTORS AND MULTITASKING
2) To my knowledge, only some uClibc++ ofstream logic is
sensitive to this. All other statically initialized classes
seem to work OK across different task groups.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. I have no plan to change this logic now unless there is
some strong demand to do so.
o Binary loaders (binfmt/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: NXFLAT TESTS
Description: Not all of the NXFLAT test under apps/examples/nxflat are working.
Most simply do not compile yet. tests/mutex runs okay but
outputs garbage on completion.
Update: 13-27-1, tests/mutex crashed with a memory corruption
problem the last time that I ran it.
Status: Open
Priority: High
Title: ARM UP_GETPICBASE()
Description: The ARM up_getpicbase() does not seem to work. This means
the some features like wdog's might not work in NXFLAT modules.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-High
Title: NXFLAT READ-ONLY DATA IN RAM
Description: At present, all .rodata must be put into RAM. There is a
tentative design change that might allow .rodata to be placed
in FLASH (see Documentation/NuttXNxFlat.html).
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
Title: GOT-RELATIVE FUNCTION POINTERS
Description: If the function pointer to a statically defined function is
taken, then GCC generates a relocation that cannot be handled
by NXFLAT. There is a solution described in Documentation/NuttXNxFlat.html,
by that would require a compiler change (which we want to avoid).
The simple workaround is to make such functions global in scope.
Status: Open
Priority: Low (probably will not fix)
Title: USE A HASH INSTEAD OF A STRING IN SYMBOL TABLES
Description: In the NXFLAT symbol tables... Using a 32-bit hash value instead
of a string to identify a symbol should result in a smaller footprint.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: WINDOWS-BASED TOOLCHAIN BUILD
Description: Windows build issue. Some of the configurations that use NXFLAT have
the linker script specified like this:
NXFLATLDFLAGS2 = $(NXFLATLDFLAGS1) -T$(TOPDIR)/binfmt/libnxflat/gnu-nxflat-gotoff.ld -no-check-sections
That will not work for windows-based tools because they require Windows
style paths. The solution is to do something like this:
if ($(CONFIG_CYGWIN_WINTOOL),y)
NXFLATLDSCRIPT=${cygpath -w $(TOPDIR)/binfmt/libnxflat/gnu-nxflat-gotoff.ld}
else
NXFLATLDSCRIPT=$(TOPDIR)/binfmt/libnxflat/gnu-nxflat-gotoff.ld
endif
Then use
NXFLATLDFLAGS2 = $(NXFLATLDFLAGS1) -T"$(NXFLATLDSCRIPT)" -no-check-sections
Status: Open
Priority: There are too many references like the above. They will have
to get fixed as needed for Windows native tool builds.
o Network (net/, drivers/net)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: LISTENING FOR UDP BROADCASTS
Description: Incoming UDP broadcast should only be accepted if listening on
INADDR_ANY(?)
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: CONCURRENT, UNBUFFERED TCP SEND OPERATIONS
Description: At present, there cannot be two concurrent active TCP send
operations in progress using the same socket *unless*
CONFIG_TCP_WRITE_BUFFER. This is because the uIP ACK logic
will support only one transfer at a time.
Such a situation could occur if explicit TCP send operations
are performed using the same socket (or dup's of the same)
socket on two different threads. It can also occur implicitly
when you execute more than one thread over and NSH Telenet
session.
There are two possible solutions:
1. Remove option to build the network without write buffering
enabled. This is is simplest and perhaps the best option.
Certainly a system can be produced with a smaller RAM
footprint without write buffering. However, that probably
does not justify permitted a crippled system.
2. Another option is to serialize the non-buffered writes for
a socket with a mutex. i.e., add a mutex to make sure that
each send that is started is able to be the exclusive
sender until all of the data to be sent has been ACKed.
That can be a very significant delay involving the send,
waiting for the ACK or a timeout and possible retransmissions!
Although it uses more memory, I believe that option 1 is the
better solution and will avoid difficult TCP bugs in the future.
Status: Open.
Priority: Medium-Low. This is only an important issue for people who
use multi-threaded, unbuffered TCP networking without a full
understanding of the issues.
Title: POLL/SELECT ON TCP/UDP SOCKETS NEEDS READ-AHEAD
Description: poll()/select() only works for availability of buffered TCP/UDP
read data (when read-ahead is enabled). The way writing is
handled in the network layer, either (1) If CONFIG_UDP/TCP_WRITE_BUFFERS=y
then we never have to wait to send; otherwise, we always have
to wait to send. So it is impossible to notify the caller
when it can send without waiting.
An exception "never having to wait" is the case where we are
out of memory for use in write buffering. In that case, the
blocking send()/sendto() would have to wait for the memory
to become available.
Status: Open, probably will not be fixed.
Priority: Medium... this does effect porting of applications that expect
different behavior from poll()/select()
Title: INTERFACES TO LEAVE/JOIN IGMP MULTICAST GROUP
Description: The interfaces used to leave/join IGMP multicast groups is non-standard.
RFC3678 (IGMPv3) suggests ioctl() commands to do this (SIOCSIPMSFILTER) but
also status that those APIs are historic. NuttX implements these ioctl
commands, but is non-standard because: (1) It does not support IGMPv3, and
(2) it looks up drivers by their device name (e.g., "eth0") vs IP address.
Linux uses setsockopt() to control multicast group membership using the
IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP and IP_DROP_MEMBERSHIP options. It also looks up drivers
using IP addresses (It would require additional logic in NuttX to look up
drivers by IP address). See http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Multicast-HOWTO-6.html
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. All standards compatibility is important to NuttX. However, most
the mechanism for leaving and joining groups is hidden behind a wrapper
function so that little of this incompatibilities need be exposed.
Title: CLOSED CONNECTIONS IN THE BACKLOG
If a connection is backlogged but accept() is not called quickly, then
that connection may time out. How should this be handled? Should the
connection be removed from the backlog if it is times out or is closed?
Or should it remain in the backlog with a status indication so that accept()
can fail when it encounters the invalid connection?
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. Important on slow applications that will not accept
connections promptly.
Title: IPv6 REQUIRES ADDRESS FILTER SUPPORT
Description: IPv6 requires that the Ethernet driver support NuttX address
filter interfaces. Several Ethernet drivers do support there,
however. Others support the address filtering interfaces but
have never been verified:
C5471, LM3S, ez80, DM0x90 NIC, PIC, LPC54: Do not support
address filtering.
Kinetis, LPC17xx, LPC43xx: Untested address filter support
Status: Open
Priority: Pretty high if you want a to use IPv6 on these platforms.
Title: UDP MULTICAST RECEPTION
Description: The logic in udp_input() expects either a single receive socket or
none at all. However, multiple sockets should be capable of
receiving a UDP datagram (multicast reception). This could be
handled easily by something like:
for (conn = NULL; conn = udp_active (pbuf, conn); )
If the callback logic that receives a packet responds with an
outgoing packet, then it will over-write the received buffer,
however. recvfrom() will not do that, however. We would have
to make that the rule: Recipients of a UDP packet must treat
the packet as read-only.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, unless your logic depends on that behavior.
Title: NETWORK WON'T STAY DOWN
Description: If you enable the NSH network monitor (CONFIG_NSH_NETINIT_MONITOR)
then the NSH 'ifdown' command is broken. Doing 'nsh> ifconfig eth0'
will, indeed, bring the network down. However, the network monitor
notices the change in the link status and will bring the network
back up. There needs to be some kind of interlock between
cmd_ifdown() and the network monitor thread to prevent this.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, this is just a nuisance in most cases.
Title: FIFO CLEAN-UP AFTER CLOSING UNIX DOMAIN DATAGRAM SOCKET
Description: FIFOs are used as the IPC underlying all local Unix domain
sockets. In NuttX, FIFOs are implemented as device drivers
(not as a special FIFO files). The FIFO device driver is
instantiated when the Unix domain socket communications begin
and will automatically be released when (1) the driver is
unlinked and (2) all open references to the driver have been
closed. But there is no mechanism in place now to unlink the
FIFO when the Unix domain datagram socket is no longer used.
The primary issue is timing.. the FIFO should persist until
it is no longer needed. Perhaps there should be a delayed
call to unlink() (using a watchdog or the work queue). If
the driver is re-opened, the delayed unlink could be
canceled? Needs more thought.
NOTE: This is not an issue for Unix domain streams sockets:
The end-of-life of the FIFO is well determined when sockets
are disconnected and support for that case is fully implemented.
Status: Open
Priority: Low for now because I don't have a situation where this is a
problem for me. If you use the same Unix domain paths, then
it is not a issue; in fact it is more efficient if the FIFO
devices persist. But this would be a serious problem if,
for example, you create new Unix domain paths dynamically.
In that case you would effectively have a memory leak and the
number of FIFO instances grow.
Title: TCP IPv4-MAPPED IPv6 ADDRESSES
Description: The UDP implementation in net/udp contains support for Hybrid
dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 implementations that utilize a special
class of addresses, the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses. You can
see that UDP implementation in:
udp_callback.c:
ip6_map_ipv4addr(ipv4addr,
udp_send.c:
ip6_is_ipv4addr((FAR struct in6_addr*)conn->u.ipv6.raddr)))
ip6_is_ipv4addr((FAR struct in6_addr*)conn->u.ipv6.raddr))
in_addr_t raddr = ip6_get_ipv4addr((FAR struct in6_addr*)conn->u.ipv6.raddr);
There is no corresponding support for TCP sockets.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. I don't know of any issues now, but I am sure that
someone will encounter this in the future.
Title: MISSING netdb INTERFACES
Description: There is no implementation for many netdb interfaces such as
getnetbyname(), getprotobyname(), getnameinfo(), etc.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: ETHERNET WITH MULTIPLE LPWORK THREADS
Description: Recently, Ethernet drivers were modified to support multiple
work queue structures. The question was raised: "My only
reservation would be, how would this interact in the case of
having CONFIG_STM32_ETHMAC_LPWORK and CONFIG_SCHED_LPNTHREADS
> 1? Can it be guaranteed that one work item won't be
interrupted and execution switched to another? I think so but
am not 100% confident."
I suspect that you right. There are probably vulnerabilities
in the CONFIG_STM32_ETHMAC_LPWORK with CONFIG_SCHED_LPNTHREADS
> 1 case. But that really doesn't depend entirely upon the
change to add more work queue structures. Certainly with only
work queue structure you would have concurrent Ethernet
operations in that multiple LP threads; just because the work
structure is available, does not mean that there is not dequeued
work in progress. The multiple structures probably widens the
window for that concurrency, but does not create it.
The current Ethernet designs depend upon a single work queue to
serialize data. In the case of multiple LP threads, some
additional mechanism would have to be added to enforce that
serialization.
NOTE: Most drivers will call net_lock() and net_unlock() around
the critical portions of the driver work. In that case, all work
will be properly serialized. This issue only applies to drivers
that may perform operations that require protection outside of
the net_lock'ed region. Sometimes, this may require extending
the netlock() to be beginning of the driver work function.
Status: Open
Priority: High if you happen to be using Ethernet in this configuration.
Title: NETWORK DRIVERS USING HIGH PRIORITY WORK QUEUE
Description: Many network drivers run the network on the high priority work
queue thread (or support an option to do so). Networking should
not be done on the high priority work thread because it interferes
with real-time behavior. Fix by forcing all network drivers to
run on the low priority work queue.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Not such big deal for demo network test and demo
configurations except that it provides a bad example for a product
OS configuration.
Title: REPARTITION DRIVER FUNCTIONALITY
Description: Every network driver performs the first level of packet decoding.
It examines the packet header and calls ipv4_input(), ipv6_input().
icmp_input(), etc. as appropriate. This is a maintenance problem
because it means that any changes to the network input interfaces
affects all drivers.
A better, more maintainable solution would use a single net_input()
function that would receive all incoming packets. This function
would then perform that common packet decoding logic that is
currently implemented in every network driver.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. Really just as aesthetic maintainability issue.
Title: BROADCAST WITH MULTIPLE NETWORK INTERFACES
Description: There is currently no mechanism to send a broadcast packet
out through several network interfaces. Currently packets
can be sent to only one device. Logic in netdev_findby_ipvXaddr()
currently just selects the first device in the list of
devices; only that device will receive broadcast packets.
Status: Open
Priority: High if you require broadcast on multiple networks. There is
no simple solution known at this time, however. Perhaps
netdev_findby_ipvXaddr() should return a list of devices rather
than a single device? All upstream logic would then have to
deal with a list of devices. That would be a huge effect and
certainly doesn't dount as a "simple solution".
Title: ICMPv6 FOR 6LoWPAN
Description: The current ICMPv6 and neighbor-related logic only works with
Ethernet MAC. For 6LoWPAN, a new more conservative IPv6
neighbour discovery is provided by RFC 6775. This RFC needs to
be supported in order to support ping6 on a 6LoWPAN network.
If RFC 6775 were implemented, then arbitrary IPv6 addresses,
including addresses from DHCPv6 could be used.
UPDATE: With IPv6 neighbor discovery, any IPv6 address may
be associated with any short or extended address. In fact,
that is the whole purpose of the neighbor discover logic: It
plays the same role as ARP in IPv4; it ultimately just manages
a neighbor table that, like the arp table, provides the
mapping between IP addresses and node addresses.
The NuttX, Contiki-based 6LoWPAN implementation circumvented
the need for the neighbor discovery logic by using only MAC-
based addressing, i.e., the lower two or eight bytes of the
IP address are the node address.
Most of the 6LoWPAN compression algorithms exploit this to
compress the IPv6 address to nothing but a bit indicating
that the IP address derives from the node address. So I
think IPv6 neighbor discover is useless in the current
implementation.
If we want to use IPv6 neighbor discovery, we could dispense
with the all MAC based addressing. But if we want to retain
the more compact MAC-based addressing, then we don't need
IPv6 neighbor discovery.
So, the full neighbor discovery logic is not currently useful,
but it would still be nice to have enough in place to support
ping6. Full neighbor support would probably be necessary if we
wanted to route 6LoWPAN frames outside of the WPAN.
Status: Open
Priority: Low for now. I don't plan on implementing this. It would
only be relevant if we were to decide to abandon the use of
MAC-based addressing in the 6LoWPAN implementation.
Title: ETHERNET LOCAL BROADCAST DOES NOT WORK
Description: In case of "local broadcast" the system still send ARP
request to the destination, but it shouldn't, it should
broadcast. For Example, the system has network with IP
10.0.0.88, netmask of 255.255.255.0, it should send
messages for 10.0.0.255 as broadcast, and not send ARP
for 10.0.0.255
For more easier networking, the next line should have give
me the broadcast address of the network, but it doesn't:
ioctl(_socket_fd, SIOCGIFBRDADDR, &bc_addr);
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
Title: TCP ISSUES WITH QUICK CLOSE
Description: This failure has been reported in the accept() logic:
- psock_tcp_accept() waits on net_lockedwait() below
- The accept operation completes, the socket is in the connected
state and psock_accept() is awakened. It cannot run,
however, because its priority is low and so it is blocked
from execution.
- In the mean time, the remote host sends a
packet which is presumably caught in the read-ahead buffer.
- Then the remote host closes the socket. Nothing happens on
the target side because net_start_monitor() has not yet been
called.
- Then accept() finally runs, but not with a connected but
rather with a disconnected socket. This fails when it
attempts to start the network monitor on the disconnected
socket below.
- It is also impossible to read the buffered TCP data from a
disconnected socket. The TCP recvfrom() logic would also
need to permit reading buffered data from a disconnected
socket.
This problem was report when the target hosted an FTP server
and files were being accessed by FileZilla.
connect() most likely has this same issue.
A work-around might be to raise the priority of the thread
that calls accept(). accept() might also need to check the
tcpstateflags in the connection structure before returning
in order to assure that the socket truly is connected.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. I have never heard of this problem being reported
before, so I suspect it might not be so prevalent as one
might expect.
Title: LOCAL DATAGRAM RECVFROM RETURNS WRONG SENDER ADDRESS
Description: The recvfrom logic for local datagram sockets returns the
incorrect sender "from" address. Instead, it returns the
receiver's "to" address. This means that returning a reply
to the "from" address receiver sending a packet to itself.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium High. This makes using local datagram sockets in
anything but a well-known point-to-point configuration
impossible.
o USB (drivers/usbdev, drivers/usbhost)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: USB STORAGE DRIVER DELAYS
Description: There is a workaround for a bug in drivers/usbdev/usbdev_storage.c.
that involves delays. This needs to be redesigned to eliminate these
delays. See logic conditioned on CONFIG_USBMSC_RACEWAR.
If queuing of stall requests is supported by the DCD then this workaround
is not required. In this case, (1) the stall is not sent until all
write requests preceding the stall request are sent, (2) the stall is
sent, and then after the stall is cleared, (3) all write requests
queued after the stall are sent.
See, for example, the queuing of pending stall requests in the SAM3/4
UDP driver at arch/arm/src/sam34/sam_udp.c. There the logic is do this
is implemented with a normal request queue, a pending request queue, a
stall flag and a stall pending flag:
1) If the normal request queue is not empty when the STALL request is
received, the stall pending flag is set.
2) If addition write requests are received while the stall pending flag
is set (or while waiting for the stall to be sent), those write requests
go into the pending queue.
3) When the normal request queue empties successful and all of the write
transfers complete, the STALL is sent. The stall pending flag is
cleared and the stall flag is set. Now the endpoint is really stalled.
4) After the STALL is cleared (via the Clear Feature SETUP), the pending
request queue is copied to the normal request queue, the stall flag is
cleared, and normal write request processing resumes.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
Title: EP0 OUT CLASS DATA
Description: There is no mechanism in place to handle EP0 OUT data transfers.
There are two aspects to this problem, neither are easy to fix
(only because of the number of drivers that would be impacted):
1. The class drivers only send EP0 write requests and these are
only queued on EP0 IN by this drivers. There is never a read
request queued on EP0 OUT.
2. But EP0 OUT data could be buffered in a buffer in the driver
data structure. However, there is no method currently
defined in the USB device interface to obtain the EP0 data.
Updates: (1) The USB device-to-class interface as been extended so
that EP0 OUT data can accompany the SETUP request sent to the
class drivers. (2) The logic in the STM32 F4 OTG FS device driver
has been extended to provide this data. Updates are still needed
to other drivers.
Here is an overview of the required changes:
New two buffers in driver structure:
1. The existing EP0 setup request buffer (ctrlreq, 8 bytes)
2. A new EP0 data buffer to driver state structure (ep0data,
max packetsize)
Add a new state:
3. Waiting for EP0 setup OUT data (EP0STATE_SETUP_OUT)
General logic flow:
1. When an EP0 SETUP packet is received:
- Read the request into EP0 setup request buffer (ctrlreq,
8 bytes)
- If this is an OUT request with data length, set the EP0
state to EP0STATE_SETUP_OUT and wait to receive data on
EP0.
- Otherwise, the SETUP request may be processed now (or,
in the case of the F4 driver, at the conclusion of the
SETUP phase).
2. When EP0 the EP0 OUT DATA packet is received:
- Verify state is EP0STATE_SETUP_OUT
- Read the request into the EP0 data buffer (ep0data, max
packet size)
- Now process the previously buffered SETUP request along
with the OUT data.
3. When the setup packet is dispatched to the class driver,
the OUT data must be passed as the final parameter in the
call.
Update 2013-9-2: The new USB device-side driver for the SAMA5D3
correctly supports OUT SETUP data following the same design as
per above.
Update 2013-11-7: David Sidrane has fixed with issue with the
STM32 F1 USB device driver. Still a few more to go before this
can be closed out.
Status: Open
Priority: High for class drivers that need EP0 data. For example, the
CDC/ACM serial driver might need the line coding data (that
data is not used currently, but it might be).
Title: IMPROVED USAGE of STM32 USB RESOURCES
Description: The STM32 platforms use a non-standard, USB host peripheral
that uses "channels" to implement data transfers the current
logic associates each channel with an pipe/endpoint (with two
channels for bi-directional control endpoints). The OTGFS
peripheral has 8 channels and the OTGHS peripheral has 12
channels.
This works okay until you add a hub and try connect multiple
devices. A typical device will require 3-4 pipes and, hence,
4-5 channels. This effectively prevents using a hub with the
STM32 devices. This also applies to the EFM32 which uses the
same IP.
It should be possible to redesign the STM32 F4 OTGHS/OTGFS and
EFM32 host driver so that channels are dynamically assigned to
pipes as needed for individual transfers. Then you could have
more "apparent" pipes and make better use of channels.
Although there are only 8 or 12 channels, transfers are not
active all of the time on all channels so it ought to be
possible to have an unlimited number of "pipes" but with no
more than 8 or 12 active transfers.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-Low
Title: USB CDC/ACM HOST CLASS DRIVER
Description: A CDC/ACM host class driver has been added. This has been
testing by running the USB CDC/ACM host on an Olimex
LPC1766STK and using the
boards/arm/stm32/stm3210e-eval/configs/usbserial
configuration (using the CDC/ACM device side driver). There
are several unresolved issues that prevent the host driver
from being usable:
- The driver works fine when configured for reduced or bulk-
only protocol on the Olimex LPC1766STK.
- Testing has not been performed with the interrupt IN channel
enabled (ie., I have not enabled FLOW control nor do I have
a test case that used the interrupt IN channel). I can see
that the polling for interrupt IN data is occurring
initially.
- I test for incoming data by doing 'nsh> cat /dev/ttyACM0' on
the Olimex LPC1766STK host. The bulk data reception still
works okay whether or not the interrupt IN channel is enabled.
If the interrupt IN channel is enabled, then polling of that
channel appears to stop when the bulk in channel becomes
active.
- The RX reception logic uses the low priority work queue.
However, that logic never returns and so blocks other use of
the work queue thread. This is probably okay but means that
the RX reception logic probably should be moved to its own
dedicated thread.
- I get crashes when I run with the STM32 OTGHS host driver.
Apparently the host driver is trashing memory on receipt
of data.
UPDATE: This behavior needs to be retested with:
commit ce2845c5c3c257d081f624857949a6afd4a4668a
Author: Janne Rosberg <janne.rosberg@offcode.fi>
Date: Tue Mar 7 06:58:32 2017 -0600
usbhost_cdcacm: fix tx outbuffer overflow and remove now
invalid assert
commit 3331e9c49aaaa6dcc3aefa6a9e2c80422ffedcd3
Author: Janne Rosberg <janne.rosberg@offcode.fi>
Date: Tue Mar 7 06:57:06 2017 -0600
STM32 OTGHS host: stm32_in_transfer() fails and returns NAK
if a short transfer is received. This causes problems from
class drivers like CDC/ACM where short packets are expected.
In those protocols, any transfer may be terminated by sending
short or NUL packet.
commit 0631c1aafa76dbaa41b4c37e18db98be47b60481
Author: Gregory Nutt <gnutt@nuttx.org>
Date: Tue Mar 7 07:17:24 2017 -0600
STM32 OTGFS, STM32 L4 and F7: Adapt Janne Rosberg's patch to
STM32 OTGHS host to OTGFS host, and to similar implements for
L4 and F7.
- The SAMA5D EHCI and the LPC31 EHCI drivers both take semaphores
in the cancel method. The current CDC/ACM class driver calls
the cancel() method from an interrupt handler. This will
cause a crash. Those EHCI drivers should be redesigned to
permit cancellation from the interrupt level.
Most of these problems are unique to the Olimex LPC1766STK
DCD; some are probably design problems in the CDC/ACM host
driver. The bottom line is that the host CDC/ACM driver is
still immature and you could experience issues in some
configurations if you use it.
That all being said, I know of no issues with the current
CDC/ACM driver on the Olimex LPC1766STK platform if the interrupt
IN endpoint is not used, i.e., in "reduced" mode. The only loss
of functionality is output flow control.
UPDATE: The CDC/ACM class driver may also now be functional on
the STM32. That needs to be verified.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-Low unless you really need host CDC/ACM support.
o Libraries (libs/libc/, libs/libm/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: SIGNED time_t
Description: The NuttX time_t is type uint32_t. I think this is consistent
with all standards and with normal usage of time_t. However,
according to Wikipedia, time_t is usually implemented as a
signed 32-bit value.
Status: Open
Priority: Very low unless there is some compelling issue that I do not
know about.
Title: ENVIRON
Description: The definition of environ in stdlib.h is bogus and will not
work as it should. This is because the underlying
representation of the environment is not an array of pointers.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
Title: TERMIOS
Description: Need some minimal termios support... at a minimum, enough to
switch between raw and "normal" modes to support behavior like
that needed for readline().
UPDATE: There is growing functionality in libs/libc/termios/
and in the ioctl methods of several MCU serial drivers (stm32,
lpc43, lpc17, pic32, and others). However, as phrased, this
bug cannot yet be closed since this "growing functionality"
does not address all termios.h functionality and not all
serial drivers support termios.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: CONCURRENT STREAM READ/WRITE
Description: NuttX only supports a single file pointer so reads and writes
must be from the same position. This prohibits implementation
of behavior like that required for fopen() with the "a+" mode.
According to the fopen man page:
"a+ Open for reading and appending (writing at end of file).
The file is created if it does not exist. The initial file
position for reading is at the beginning of the file, but
output is always appended to the end of the file."
At present, the single NuttX file pointer is positioned to the
end of the file for both reading and writing.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. This kind of operation is probably not very common in
deeply embedded systems but is required by standards.
Title: DIVIDE BY ZERO
Description: This is bug 3468949 on the SourceForge website (submitted by
Philipp Klaus Krause):
"lib_strtod.c does contain divisions by zero in lines 70 and 96.
AFAIK, unlike for Java, division by zero is not a reliable way to
get infinity in C. AFAIK compilers are allowed e.g. give a compile-
time error, and some, such as sdcc, do. AFAIK, C implementations
are not even required to support infinity. In C99 the macro isinf()
could replace the first use of division by zero. Unfortunately, the
macro INFINITY from math.h probably can't replace the second division
by zero, since it will result in a compile-time diagnostic, if the
implementation does not support infinity."
Status: Open
Priority:
Title: OLD dtoa NEEDS TO BE UPDATED
Description: This implementation of dtoa in libs/libc/stdio is old and will not
work with some newer compilers. See
http://patrakov.blogspot.com/2009/03/dont-use-old-dtoac.html
Update: A new dtoa version is not available and enabled with
CONFIG_NANO_PRINF. However, the old version of dtoa is still in
in place and lib_libvsprintf() has been dupliated. I think this
issue should remain open until the implementations have been
unified.
Status: Open
Priority: ??
Title: FLOATING POINT FORMATS
Description: Only the %f floating point format is supported. Others are
accepted but treated like %f.
Update: %g is supported with CONFIG_NANO_PRINTF.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium (this might important to someone).
Title: LIBM INACCURACIES
Description: "..if you are writing something like robot control or
inertial navigation system for aircraft, I have found
that using the toolchain libmath is only safe option.
I ported some code for converting quaternions to Euler
angles to NuttX for my project and only got it working
after switching to newlib math library.
"NuttX does not fully implement IEC 60559 floating point
from C99 (sections marked [MX] in OpenGroup specs) so if
your code assumes that some function, say pow(), actually
behaves right for all the twenty or so odd corner cases
that the standards committees have recently specified,
you might get surprises. I'd expect pow(0.0, 1.0) to
return 0.0 (as zero raised to any positive power is
well-defined in mathematics) but I get +Inf.
"NuttX atan2(-0.0, -1.0) returns +M_PI instead of correct
-M_PI. If we expect [MX] functionality, then atan2(Inf, Inf)
should return M_PI/4, instead NuttX gives NaN.
"asin(2.0) does not set domain error or return NaN. In fact
it does not return at all as the loop in it does not
converge, hanging your app.
"There are likely many other issues like these as the Rhombus
OS code has not been tested or used that much. Sorry for not
providing patches, but we found it easier just to switch the
math library."
UPDATE: 2015-09-01: A fix for the noted problems with asin()
has been applied.
2016-07-30: Numerous fixes and performance improvements from
David Alessio.
Status: Open
Priority: Low for casual users but clearly high if you need care about
these incorrect corner case behaviors in the math libraries.
Title: REPARTITION LIBC FUNCTIONALITY
Description: There are many things implemented within the kernel (for example
under sched/pthread) that probably should be migrated in the
C library where it belongs.
I would really like to see a little flavor of a micro-kernel
at the OS interface: I would like to see more primitive OS
system calls with more higher level logic in the C library.
One awkward thing is the incompatibility of KERNEL vs FLAT
builds: In the kernel build, it would be nice to move many
of the thread-specific data items out of the TCB and into
the process address environment where they belong. It is
difficult to make this compatible with the FLAT build,
however.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
o File system / Generic drivers (fs/, drivers/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
NOTE: The NXFFS file system has its own TODO list at nuttx/fs/nxffs/README.txt
Title: MISSING FILE SYSTEM FEATURES
Description: Implement missing file system features:
chmod() is probably not relevant since file modes are not
currently supported.
File privileges would also be good to support. But this is
really a small part of a much larger feature. NuttX has no
user IDs, there are no groups, there are no privileges
associated with either. User's don't need credentials.
This is really a system wide issues of which chmod is only
a small part.
User privileges never seemed important to me since NuttX is
intended for deeply embedded environments where there are
not multiple users with varying levels of trust.
link, unlink, softlink, readlink - For symbolic links. Only
the ROMFS file system currently supports hard and soft links,
so this is not too important. The top-level, pseudo-file
system supports soft links.
File locking
Special files - NuttX support special files only in the top-
level pseudo file system. Unix systems support many
different special files via mknod(). This would be
important only if it is an objective of NuttX to become a
true Unix OS. Again only supported by ROMFS.
True inodes - Standard Unix inodes. Currently only supported
by ROMFs.
File times, for example as set by utimes().
The primary obstacle to all these is that each would require
changes to all existing file systems. That number is pretty
large. The number of file system implementations that would
need to be reviewed and modified As of this writing this
would include binfs, fat, hostfs, nfs, nxffs, procfs, romfs,
tmpfs, unionfs, plus pseduo-file system support.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: ROMFS CHECKSUMS
Description: The ROMFS file system does not verify checksums on either
volume header on on the individual files.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. I have mixed feelings about if NuttX should pay a
performance penalty for better data integrity.
Title: SPI-BASED SD MULTIPLE BLOCK TRANSFERS
Description: The simple SPI based MMCS/SD driver in fs/mmcsd does not
yet handle multiple block transfers.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-Low
Title: SDIO-BASED SD READ-AHEAD/WRITE BUFFERING INCOMPLETE
Description: The drivers/mmcsd/mmcsd_sdio.c driver has hooks in place to
support read-ahead buffering and write buffering, but the logic
is incomplete and untested.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: POLLHUP SUPPORT
Description: All drivers that support the poll method should also report
POLLHUP event when the driver is closed.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium-Low
Title: UNIFIED DESCRIPTOR REPRESENTATION
Description: There are two separate ranges of descriptors for file and
socket descriptors: if a descriptor is in one range then it is
recognized as a file descriptor; if it is in another range
then it is recognized as a socket descriptor. These separate
descriptor ranges can cause problems, for example, they make
dup'ing descriptors with dup2() problematic. The two groups
of descriptors are really indices into two separate tables:
On an array of file structures and the other an array of
socket structures. There really should be one array that
is a union of file and socket descriptors. Then socket and
file descriptors could lie in the same range.
Another example of how the current implementation limits
functionality: I recently started to implement of the FILEMAX
(using pctl() instead sysctl()). My objective was to be able
to control the number of available file descriptors on a task-
by-task basis. The complexity due to the partitioning of
descriptor space into a range for file descriptors and a range
for socket descriptors made this feature nearly impossible to
implement.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: DUPLICATE FAT FILE NAMES
Description: "The NSH and POSIX API interpretations about sensitivity or
insensitivity to upper/lowercase file names seem to be not
consistent in our usage - which can result in creating two
directories with the same name..."
Example using NSH:
nsh> echo "Test1" >/tmp/AtEsT.tXt
nsh> echo "Test2" >/tmp/aTeSt.TxT
nsh> ls /tmp
/tmp:
AtEsT.tXt
aTeSt.TxT
nsh> cat /tmp/aTeSt.TxT
Test2
nsh> cat /tmp/AtEsT.tXt
Test1
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: MISSING FILES IN NSH 'LS' OF A DIRECTORY
Description: I have seen cases where (1) long file names are enabled,
but (2) a short file name is created like:
nsh> echo "This is another test" >/mnt/sdcard/another.txt
But then on subsequent 'ls' operations, the file does not appear:
nsh> ls -l /mnt/sdcard
I have determined that the problem is because, for some as-
of-yet-unknown reason the short file name is treated as a long
file name. The name then fails the long filename checksum
test and is skipped.
readdir() (and fat_readdir()) is the logic underlying the
failure and the problem appears to be something unique to the
fat_readdir() implementation. Why? Because the file is
visible when you put the SD card on a PC and because this
works fine:
nsh> ls -l /mnt/sdcard/another.txt
The failure does not happen on all short file names. I do
not understand the pattern. But I have not had the opportunity
to dig into this deeply.
Status: Open
Priority: Perhaps not a problem??? I have analyzed this problem and
I am not sure what to do about it. I am suspected that a
fat filesystem was used with a version of NuttX that does
not support long file name entries. Here is the failure
scenario:
1) A file with a long file name is created under Windows.
2) Then the file is deleted. I am not sure if Windows or
NuttX deleted the file, but the resulting directory
content is not compatible with NuttX with long file
name support.
The file deletion left the full sequence of long
file name entries intact but apparently delete only
the following short file name entry. I am thinking
that this might have happened because a version of NuttX
with only short file name support was used to delete
the file.
3) When a new file with a short file name was created, it
re-used the short file name entry that was previously
deleted. This makes the new short file name entry
look like a part of the long file name.
4) When comparing the checksum in the long file name
entry with the checksum of the short file name, the
checksum fails and the entire directory sequence is
ignored by readdir() logic. This is why the file does
not appear in the 'ls'.
Title: SILENT SPIFFS FILE TRUNCATION
Description: Under certain corner case conditions, SPIFFS will truncate
files. All of the writes to the file will claim that the
data has been written but after the file is closed, it may
be a little shorter than expected.
This is due to how the caching is implemented in SPIFFS:
1. On each write, the data is not written to the FLASH but
rather to an internal cache in memory.
2. When the a write causes the cache to become full, the
content of cache is flushed to memory. If that flush
fails because the FLASH has become full, write will
return the file system full error (ENOSPC).
3. The cache is also flushed when the file is closed (or
when fsync() is called). These will also fail if the
file system becomes full.
The problem is when the file is closed, the final file
size could be smaller than the number of successful writes
to the file.
This error is probably not so significant in a real world
file system usage: It requires that you write continuously
to SPIFFS, never deleting files or freeing FLASH resources
in any way. And it requires the unlikely circumstance that
the final file written has its last few hundred bytes in
cache when the file is closed but there are even fewer bytes
available on the FLASH. That would be rare with a cache
size of a few hundred bytes and very large serial FLASH.
This issue does cause the test at apps/testing/fstest to
fail. That test fails with a "Partial Read" because the
file being read is smaller than number bytes written to the
file. That test does write small files continuously until
file system is full and even the the error is rare. The
boards/sim/sim/sim/configs/spiffs test can used to
demonstrate the error.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. It is certain a file system failure, but I think that
the exposure in real world uses cases is very small.
Title: FAT: CAN'T SEEK TO END OF FILE IF READ-ONLY
Description: If the size of the underlying file is an exact multiple of the
FAT cluster size, then you cannot seek to the end of the file
if the file was opened read-only. In that case, the FAT lseek
logic will return ENOSPC.
This is because seeking to the end of the file involves seeking
to an offset that is the size of the file (number of bytes
allocated for file + 1). In order to seek to a position, the
current FAT implementation insists that there be allocated file
space at the seek position. Seeking beyond the end of the file
has the side effect of extending the file.
[NOTE: This automatic extension of the file cluster allocation
is probably unnecessary and another issue of its own.]
For example, suppose you have a cluster size that is 4096 bytes
and a file that is 8192 bytes long. Then the file will consist
of 2 allocated clusters at offsets 0 through 8191.
If the file is opened O_RDWR or O_WRONLY, then the statement:
offset = lseek(fd, 0, SET_SEEK);
will seek to offset 8192 which beyond the end of the file so a
new (empty) cluster will be added. Now the file consists of
three clusters and the file position refers to the first byte of
the third cluster.
If the file is open O_RDONLY, however, then that same lseek
statement will fail. It is not possible to seek to position
8192. That is beyond the end of the allocated cluster chain
and since the file is read-only, it is not permitted to extend
the cluster chain. Hence, the error ENOSPC is returned.
This code snippet will duplicate the problem. It assumes a
cluster size of 512 and that /tmp is a mounted FAT file system:
#define BUFSIZE 1024 //8192, depends on cluster size
static char buffer[BUFSIZE];
#if defined(BUILD_MODULE)
int main(int argc, FAR char *argv[])
#else
int hello_main(int argc, char *argv[])
#endif
{
ssize_t nwritten;
off_t pos;
int fd;
int ch;
int i;
for (i = 0, ch = ' '; i < BUFSIZE; i++)
{
buffer[i] = ch;
if (++ch == 0x7f)
{
ch = ' ';
}
}
fd = open("/tmp/testfile", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, 0644);
if (fd < 0)
{
printf("open failed: %d\n", errno);
return 1;
}
nwritten = write(fd, buffer, BUFSIZE);
if (nwritten < 0)
{
printf("write failed: %d\n", errno);
return 1;
}
close(fd);
fd = open("/tmp/testfile", O_RDONLY);
if (fd < 0)
{
printf("open failed: %d\n", errno);
return 1;
}
pos = lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_END);
if (pos < 0)
{
printf("lseek failed: %d\n", errno);
return 1;
}
else if (pos != BUFSIZE)
{
printf("lseek failed: %d\n", pos);
return 1;
}
close(fd);
return 0;
}
Status: Open
Priority: Medium. Although this is a significant design error, the problem
has existed for 11 years without being previously reported. I
conclude, then that the exposure from this problem is not great.
Why would you seek to the end of a file using a read=only file
descriptor anyway? Only one reason I can think of: To get the
size of the file. The alternative (and much more efficient) way
to do that is via stat().
o Graphics Subsystem (graphics/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
See also the NxWidgets TODO list file for related issues.
Title: UNTESTED GRAPHICS APIS
Description: Testing of all APIs is not complete. See
http://nuttx.sourceforge.net/NXGraphicsSubsystem.html#testcoverage
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
Title: ITALIC FONTS / NEGATIVE FONT OFFSETS
Description: Font metric structure (in include/nuttx/nx/nxfont.h) should allow
negative X offsets. Negative x-offsets are necessary for certain
glyphs (and is very common in italic fonts).
For example Eth, icircumflex, idieresis, and oslash should have
offset=1 in the 40x49b font (these missing negative offsets are
NOTE'ed in the font header files).
Status: Open. The problem is that the x-offset is an unsigned bitfield
in the current structure.
Priority: Low.
Title: RAW WINDOW AUTORAISE
Description: Auto-raise only applies to NXTK windows. Shouldn't it also apply
to raw windows as well?
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: AUTO-RAISE DISABLED
Description: Auto-raise is currently disabled. The reason is complex:
- Most touchscreen controls send touch data a high rates
- In multi-server mode, touch events get queued in a message
queue.
- The logic that receives the messages performs the auto-raise.
But it can do stupid things after the first auto-raise as
it operates on the stale data in the message queue.
I am thinking that auto-raise ought to be removed from NuttX
and moved out into a graphics layer (like NxWM) that knows
more about the appropriate context to do the autoraise.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium low
Title: NxTERM VT100 SUPPORT
Description: If the NxTerm will be used with the Emacs-like command line
editor (CLE), then it will need to support VT100 cursor control
commands.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, the need has not yet arisen.
Title: VERTICAL ANTI-ALIASING
Description: Anti-aliasing is implemented along the horizontal raster line
with fractional pixels at the ends of each line. There is no
accounting for fractional pixels in the vertical direction.
As a result lines closer to vertical receive better anti-
aliasing than lines closer to horizontal.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, not a serious issue but worth noting. There is no plan
to change this behavior.
Title: WIDE-FONT SUPPORT
Description: Wide fonts are not currently supported by the NuttX graphics sub-
system.
Status: Open
Priority: Low for many, but I imagine higher in countries that use wide fonts
Title: LOW-RES FRAMEBUFFER RENDERING
Description: There are obvious issues in the low-res, < 8 BPP, implementation of
the framebuffer rendering logic of graphics/nxglib/fb. I see two
obvious problems in reviewing nxglib_copyrectangle():
1. The masking logic might work 1 BPP, but is insufficient for other
resolutions like 2-BPP and 4-BPP.
2. The use of lnlen will not handle multiple bits per pixel. It
would need to be converted to a byte count.
The function PDC_copy_glyph() in the file apps/graphics/pdcurs34/nuttx/pdcdisp.c
derives from nxglib_copyrectangle() and all of those issues have been
resolved in that file.
Other framebuffer rendering functions probably have similar issues.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. It is not surprising that there would be bugs in this logic:
I have never encountered a hardware framebuffer with sub-byte pixel
depth. If such a beast ever shows up, then this priority would be
higher.
Title: INCOMPLATE PLANAR COLOR SUPPORT
Description: The original NX design included support for planar colors,
i.e,. for devices that provide separate framebuffers for each
color component. Planar graphics hard was common some years
back but is rarely encountered today. In fact, I am not aware
of any MCU that implements planar framebuffers.
Support for planar colors is, however, unverified and
incomplete. In fact, many recent changes explicitly assume a
single color plane: Planar colors are specified by a array
of components; some recent logic uses only component [0],
ignoring the possible existence of other color component frames.
Completely removing planar color support is one reasonable
options; it is not likely that NuttX will encounter planar
color hardware and this would greatly simplify the logic and
eliminate inconsistencies in the immplementation.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. There is no problem other than one of aesthetics.
o Build system
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: MAKE EXPORT LIMITATIONS
Description: The top-level Makefile 'export' target that will bundle up all of the
NuttX libraries, header files, and the startup object into an export-able
tarball. This target uses the tools/mkexport.sh script. Issues:
1. This script assumes the host archiver ar may not be appropriate for
non-GCC toolchains
2. For the kernel build, the user libraries should be built into some
libuser.a. The list of user libraries would have to accepted with
some new argument, perhaps -u.
Status: Open
Priority: Low.
o Other drivers (drivers/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: SYSLOG OUTPUT LOST ON A CRASH
Description: Flush syslog output on crash. I don't know how to do in the
character driver case with interrupts disabled. It would be
easy to flush the interrupt interrupt buffer, but not the
data buffered within a character driver (such as the serial
driver).
Perhaps there could be a crash dump IOCTL command to flush
that buffered data with interrupts disabled?
Status: Open
Priority: Low. It would be a convenience and would simplify crash
debug if you could see all of the SYSLOG output up to the
time of the crash. But not essential.
Title: SERIAL DRIVER WITH DMA DOES NOT DISCARD OOB CHARACTERS
Description: If Ctrl-Z or Ctrl-C actions are enabled, the the OOB
character that generates the signal action must not be placed
in the serial driver Rx buffer. This behavior is correct for
the non-DMA case (serial_io.c), but not for the DMA case
(serial_dma.c). In the DMA case, the OOB character is left
in the Rx buffer and will be received as normal Rx data by
the application. It should not work that way.
Perhaps in the DMA case, the OOB characters could be filtered
out later, just before returning the Rx data to the application?
Status: Open
Priority: Low, provided that the application can handle these characters
in the data stream.
o Linux/Cygwin simulation (arch/sim)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: SIMULATOR HAS NO INTERRUPTS (NON-PREMPTIBLE)
Description: The current simulator implementation is has no interrupts and, hence,
is non-preemptible. Also, without simulated interrupt, there can
be no high-fidelity simulated device drivers.
Currently, all timing and serial input is simulated in the IDLE loop:
When nothing is going on in the simulation, the IDLE loop runs and
fakes timer and UART events.
Status: Open
Priority: Low, unless there is a need for developing a higher fidelity simulation
I have been thinking about how to implement simulated interrupts in
the simulation. I think a solution would work like this:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NUTTX/NuttX+Simulation
Title: ROUND-ROBIN SCHEDULING IN THE SIMULATOR
Description: Since the simulation is not pre-emptible, you can't use round-robin
scheduling (no time slicing). Currently, the timer interrupts are
"faked" during IDLE loop processing and, as a result, there is no
task pre-emption because there are no asynchronous events. This could
probably be fixed if the "timer interrupt" were driver by Linux
signals. NOTE: You would also have to implement up_irq_save() and
up_irq_restore() to block and (conditionally) unblock the signal.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
o ARM (arch/arm/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: IMPROVED ARM INTERRUPT HANDLING
Description: ARM interrupt handling performance could be improved in some
ways. One easy way is to use a pointer to the context save
area in g_current_regs instead of using up_copystate so much.
This approach is already implemented for the ARM Cortex-M0,
Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, and Cortex-A5 families. But still needs
to be back-ported to the ARM7 and ARM9 (which are nearly
identical to the Cortex-A5 in this regard). The change is
*very* simple for this architecture, but not implemented.
Status: Open. But complete on all ARM platforms except ARM7 and ARM9.
Priority: Low.
Title: IMPROVED ARM INTERRUPT HANDLING
Description: The ARM and Cortex-M3 interrupt handlers restores all registers
upon return. This could be improved as well: If there is no
context switch, then the static registers need not be restored
because they will not be modified by the called C code.
(see arch/renesas/src/sh1/sh1_vector.S for example)
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: CORTEX-M3 STACK OVERFLOW
Description: There is bit bit logic in up_fullcontextrestore() that executes on
return from interrupts (and other context switches) that looks like:
ldr r1, [r0, #(4*REG_CPSR)] /* Fetch the stored CPSR value */
msr cpsr, r1 /* Set the CPSR */
/* Now recover r0 and r1 */
ldr r0, [sp]
ldr r1, [sp, #4]
add sp, sp, #(2*4)
/* Then return to the address at the stop of the stack,
* destroying the stack frame
*/
ldr pc, [sp], #4
Under conditions of excessively high interrupt conditions, many
nested interrupts can occur just after the 'msr cpsr' instruction.
At that time, there are 4 bytes on the stack and, with each
interrupt, the stack pointer may increment and possibly overflow.
This can happen only under conditions of continuous interrupts.
One suggested change is:
ldr r1, [r0, #(4*REG_CPSR)] /* Fetch the stored CPSR value */
msr spsr_cxsf, r1 /* Set the CPSR */
ldmia r0, {r0-r15}^
But this has not been proven to be a solution.
UPDATE: Other ARM architectures have a similar issue.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. The conditions of continuous interrupts is really the problem.
If your design needs continuous interrupts like this, please try
the above change and, please, submit a patch with the working fix.
Title: IMPROVED TASK START-UP AND SYSCALL RETURN
Description: Couldn't up_start_task and up_start_pthread syscalls be
eliminated. Wouldn't this work to get us from kernel-
to user-mode with a system trap:
lda r13, #address
str rn, [r13]
msr spsr_SVC, rm
ld r13,{r15}^
Would also need to set r13_USER and r14_USER. For new
SYS_context_switch... couldn't we do he same thing?
Also... System calls use traps to get from user- to kernel-
mode to perform OS services. That is necessary to get from
user- to kernel-mode. But then another trap is used to get
from kernel- back to user-mode. It seems like this second
trap should be unnecessary. We should be able to do the
same kind of logic to do this.
Status: Open
Priority: Low-ish, but a good opportunity for performance improvement.
Title: USE COMMON VECTOR LOGIC IN ALL ARM ARCHITECTURES.
Description: Originally, each ARMv7-M MCU architecture had its own
private implementation for interrupt vectors and interrupt
handling logic. This was superseded by common interrupt
vector logic but these private implementations were never
removed from older MCU architectures. This is turning into
a maintenance issue because any improvements to the common
vector handling must also be re-implemented for each of the
older MCU architectures.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. A pain in the ass and an annoying implementation, but
not really an issue otherwise.
o Network Utilities (apps/netutils/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: UNVERIFIED THTTPD FEATURES
Description: Not all THTTPD features/options have been verified. In
particular, there is no test case of a CGI program receiving
POST input. Only the configuration of apps/examples/thttpd
has been tested.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium
o NuttShell (NSH) (apps/nshlib)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
See some NHS issues under "Kernel/Protected Build" as well.
Title: IFCONFIG AND MULTIPLE NETWORK INTERFACES
Description: The ifconfig command will not behave correctly if an interface
is provided and there are multiple interfaces. It should only
show status for the single interface on the command line; it will
still show status for all interfaces.
Status: Open
Priority: Low
o System libraries apps/system (apps/system)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: READLINE IMPLEMENTATION
Description: readline implementation does not use C-buffered I/O, but rather
talks to serial driver directly via read(). It includes VT-100
specific editing commands. A more generic readline() should be
implemented using termios' tcsetattr() to put the serial driver
into a "raw" mode.
Status: Open
Priority: Low (unless you are using mixed C-buffered I/O with readline and
fgetc, for example).
Title: apps/system PARTITIONING
Description: Several of the USB device helper applications in apps/system
violate OS/application partitioning and will fail on a kernel
or protected build. Many of these have been fixed by adding
the BOARDIOC_USBDEV_CONTROL boardctl() command. But there are
still issues.
These functions still call directly into operating system
functions:
- usbmsc_configure - Called from apps/system/usbmsc and
apps/system/composite
- usbmsc_bindlun - Called from apps/system/usbmsc
- usbmsc_exportluns - Called from apps/system/usbmsc.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium/High -- the kernel build configuration is not fully fielded
yet.
o Modbus (apps/modbus)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: MODBUS NOT USABLE WITH USB SERIAL
Description: Modbus can be used with USB serial, however, if the USB
serial connection is lost, Modbus will hang in an infinite
loop.
This is a problem in the handling of select() and read()
and could probably resolved by studying the Modbus error
handling.
A more USB-friendly solution would be to: (1) Re-connect and
(2) re-open the serial drivers. That is what is done is NSH.
When the serial USB device is removed, this terminates the
session and NSH will then try to re-open the USB device. See
the function nsh_waitusbready() in the file
apps/nshlib/nsh_usbconsole.c. When the USB serial is
reconnected the open() in the function will succeed and a new
session will be started.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This is really an enhancement request: Modbus was never
designed to work with removable serial devices.
o Other Applications & Tests (apps/examples/)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Title: EXAMPLES/PIPE ON CYGWIN
Description: The redirection test (part of examples/pipe) terminates
incorrectly on the Cygwin-based simulation platform (but works
fine on the Linux-based simulation platform).
Status: Open
Priority: Low
Title: EXAMPLES/SENDMAIL UNTESTED
Description: examples/sendmail is untested on the target (it has been tested
on the host, but not on the target).
Status: Open
Priority: Med
Title: EXAMPLES/NX FONT CACHING
Description: The font caching logic in examples/nx is incomplete. Fonts are
added to the cache, but never removed. When the cache is full
it stops rendering. This is not a problem for the examples/nx
code because it uses so few fonts, but if the logic were
leveraged for more general purposes, it would be a problem.
Update: see examples/nxtext for some improved font cache handling.
Update: The NXTERM font cache has been generalized and is now
offered as the standard, common font cache for all applications.
both the nx and nxtext examples should be modified to use this
common font cache. See interfaces defined in nxfonts.h.
Status: Open
Priority: Low. This is not really a problem because examples/nx works
fine with its bogus font caching.
Title: EXAMPLES/NXTEXT ARTIFACTS
Description: examples/nxtext. Artifacts when the pop-up window is opened.
There are some artifacts that appear in the upper left hand
corner. These seems to be related to window creation. At
tiny artifact would not be surprising (the initial window
should like at (0,0) and be of size (1,1)), but sometimes
the artifact is larger.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium.
Title: ILLEGAL CALLS TO romdisk_register()
Description: Several examples (and other things under apps/) make illegal
calls to romdisk_register(). This both violates the portable
POSIX OS interface and makes these applications un-usable in
PROTECTED and KERNEL build modes.
Non-compliant examples include:
examples/bastest, examples/elf, examples/module,
examples/nxflat, examples/posix_spawn, examples/romfs,
examples/sotest, examples/thttpd, examples/unionfs
These examples are simple demos and, hence, you could argue that
it is not so bad that they violate the interface for the purpose
of demonstration (although they do set a bad example because of
this).
These examples should, of course, use boardctl(BOARDIOC_ROMDISK)
to create the ROM disk instead of calling romdisk_register()
directly.
Status: Open
Priority: Medium.
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