TODO

NuttX TODO List (Last updated August 18, 2014)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This file summarizes known NuttX bugs, limitations, inconsistencies with
standards, things that could be improved, and ideas for enhancements.  See
also individual README.txt files in the configs/ sub-directories for each
board port.

nuttx/

  (9)  Task/Scheduler (sched/)
  (2)  Memory Managment (mm/)
  (3)  Signals (sched/, arch/)
  (2)  pthreads (sched/)
 (11)  Kernel Build
  (4)  C++ Support
  (6)  Binary loaders (binfmt/)
 (13)  Network (net/, drivers/net)
  (4)  USB (drivers/usbdev, drivers/usbhost)
 (10)  Libraries (libc/, )
 (13)  File system/Generic drivers (fs/, drivers/)
  (6)  Graphics subystem (graphics/)
  (1)  Pascal add-on (pcode/)
  (1)  Documentation (Documentation/)
  (5)  Build system / Toolchains
  (5)  Linux/Cywgin simulation (arch/sim)
  (4)  ARM (arch/arm/)
  (1)  ARM/C5471 (arch/arm/src/c5471/)
  (3)  ARM/DM320 (arch/arm/src/dm320/)
  (2)  ARM/i.MX (arch/arm/src/imx/)
  (3)  ARM/LPC17xx (arch/arm/src/lpc17xx/)
  (7)  ARM/LPC214x (arch/arm/src/lpc214x/)
  (2)  ARM/LPC313x (arch/arm/src/lpc313x/)
  (0)  ARM/LPC43x (arch/arm/src/lpc43xx/)
  (3)  ARM/STR71x (arch/arm/src/str71x/)
  (3)  ARM/LM3S6918 (arch/arm/src/lm/)
  (x)  ARM/SAMA5D3 ((arch/arm/src/sama5/)
  (5)  ARM/STM32 (arch/arm/src/stm32/)
  (3)  AVR (arch/avr)
  (0)  Intel x86 (arch/x86)
  (3)  MIPS/PIC32 (arch/mips)
  (1)  Hitachi/Renesas SH-1 (arch/sh/src/sh1)
  (4)  Renesas M16C/26 (arch/sh/src/m16c)
 (11)  z80/z8/ez80/z180 (arch/z80/)
  (9)  z16 (arch/z16/)
  (1)  mc68hc1x (arch/hc)

apps/

  (4)  Network Utilities (apps/netutils/)
  (3)  NuttShell (NSH) (apps/nshlib)
  (1)  System libraries apps/system (apps/system)
  (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?
  Status:      Closed.  No, this behavior will not be implemented.
  Priority:    Medium, required for good emulation of process/pthread model.

  Title:       pause() NON-COMPLIANCE
  Description: In the POSIX description of this function is the pause() function
               will 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:
               http://www.nuttx.org/NuttXDemandPaging.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
               configs/ea3131/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
               NutX 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:       INCOMPATIBILITES 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() AND on_exit()
  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?

               The fix for all of these issues it to have the callbacks
               run on the caller's thread (as with signal handlers).
  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 appliction:  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 childs 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 pterrno field from
               struct tcb_s to struct task_group_s.   However, I am still not
               sure if this should be done or not.
  Status:      Closed.  The existing solution is better (although its
               incompatibilities could show up in porting some code).
  Priority:    Low

o Memory Managment (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