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NuttX TODO List (Last updated January 6, 2017)
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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 boar ports. See
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also the individual README.txt files in the configs/ sub-directories for
issues related to each board port.
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nuttx/:
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 (12)  Task/Scheduler (sched/)
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  (1)  Memory Management (mm/)
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  (1)  Power Management (drivers/pm)
  (3)  Signals (sched/signal, arch/)
  (2)  pthreads (sched/pthread)
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 (12)  Network (net/, drivers/net)
  (4)  USB (drivers/usbdev, drivers/usbhost)
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  (0)  Other drivers (drivers/)
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 (12)  Libraries (libc/, libm/)
 (11)  File system/Generic drivers (fs/, drivers/)
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  (8)  Graphics Subsystem (graphics/)
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  (2)  Build system / Toolchains
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  (3)  Linux/Cywgin simulation (arch/sim)
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  (4)  ARM (arch/arm/)
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apps/ and other Add-Ons:
  (2)  NuttShell (NSH) (apps/nshlib)
  (1)  System libraries apps/system (apps/system)
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  (1)  Pascal add-on (pcode/)
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  (4)  Other Applications & Tests (apps/examples/)
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o Task/Scheduler (sched/)
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  Title:       CHILD PTHREAD TERMINATION
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  Description: When a tasks exits, shouldn't all of its child pthreads also be
               terminated?
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  Status:      Closed.  No, this behavior will not be implemented.
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  Priority:    Medium, required for good emulation of process/pthread model.

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  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.
  Description: On-demand paging has recently been incorporated into the RTOS.
               The design of this feature is described here:
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               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.
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  Status:      Open.  This has been put on the shelf for some time.
  Priority:    Medium-Low

  Title:       GET_ENVIRON_PTR()
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  Description: get_environ_ptr() (sched/sched_getenvironptr.c) is not implemented.
               The representation of the environment strings selected for
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               NuttX is not compatible with the operation.  Some significant
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               re-design would be required to implement this function and that
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               effort is thought to be not worth the result.
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  Status:      Open.  No change is planned.
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  Priority:    Low -- There is no plan to implement this.

  Title:       TIMER_GETOVERRUN()
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  Description: timer_getoverrun() (sched/timer_getoverrun.c) is not implemented.
  Status:      Open
  Priority:    Low -- There is no plan to implement this.

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  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(), these
                  callbacks will run on the thread of execution and address
                  context of the caller of task.  That is very bad!

               The fix for all of these issues it to have the callbacks
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               run on the caller's thread as is currently done with
               signal handlers.  Signals are delivered differently in
               PROTECTED and KERNEL modes:  The deliver is involes 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
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               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
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               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 pterrno field from
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               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).
  Title:       RELEASE SEMAPHORES HELD BY CANCELED THREADS:
  Description: Commit: fecb9040d0e54baf14b729e556a832febfe8229e: "In
                case a thread is doing a blocking operation (e.g. read())
                on a serial device, while it is being terminated by
                pthread_cancel(), then uart_close() gets called, but
                the semaphore (dev->recv.sem in the above example) is
                still blocked.

               "This means that once the serial device is opened next
                time, data will arrive on the serial port (and driver
                interrupts handled as normal), but the received characters
                never arrive in the reader thread.

                This patch addresses the problem by re-initializing the
                semaphores on the last uart_close() on the device."

               Yahoo! Groups message 7726: "I think that the system
                should be required to handle pthread_cancel safely in
                all cases.  In the NuttX model, a task is like a Unix
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                process and a pthread is like a Unix thread.  Canceling
                threads should always be safe (or at least as unsafe) as
                under Unix because the model is complete for pthreads...

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               "So, in my opinion, this is a generic system issue, not
                specific to the serial driver.  I could also implement
                logic to release all semaphores held by a thread when
                it exits -- but only if priority inheritance is enabled;
                because only in that case does the code have any memory
                of which threads actually hold the semaphore.

               "The patch I just incorporated is also insufficient.  It
                works only if the serial driver is shut down when the
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                thread is canceled.  But what if there are other open
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