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Gregory Nutt
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NuttX TODO List (Last updated February 8, 2016)
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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
altheso individual README.txt files in the configs/ sub-directories for
issues reated to each board port.
(2) pthreads (sched/pthread)
Gregory Nutt
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(0) Message Queues (sched/mqueue)
(6) Kernel/Protected Build
(3) C++ Support
(6) Binary loaders (binfmt/)
Gregory Nutt
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(4) USB (drivers/usbdev, drivers/usbhost)
(11) File system/Generic drivers (fs/, drivers/)
(1) Build system / Toolchains
Gregory Nutt
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(3) Network Utilities (apps/netutils/)
(2) NuttShell (NSH) (apps/nshlib)
(1) System libraries apps/system (apps/system)
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.
Description: get_environ_ptr() (sched/sched_getenvironptr.c) is not implemented.
The representation of the environment strings selected for
re-design would be required to implement this function and that
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
patacongo
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Title: ISSUES WITH atexit() AND on_exit()
Description: These functions execute with the following bad properties:
patacongo
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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 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).
patacongo
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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).
patacongo
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Priority: Low
Title: REMOVE TASK_DELETE
Description: Need to remove or fix task delete. This interface is non-
standard and not safe. Arbitrary deleting tasks can cause
serious problems such as memory leaks. Better to remove it
than to retain it as a latent bug.
Currently used within the OS and also part of the
implementation of pthread_cancel() and task_restart() (which
should also go for the same reasons). It is used in
NxWM::CNxConsole to terminate console tasks and also in
apps/netutils/thttpd to kill CGI tasks that timeout.
Status: Open
Priority: Low and not easily removable.
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
process and a pthread is like a Unix thread. Cancelling
threads should always be safe (or at least as unsafe) as
under Unix because the model is complete for pthreads...
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
thread is cancelled. But what if there are other open
references to the driver? Then the driver will not be
shut down, the semaphores will not be re-initialized, and
the semaphore counts will still be off by one.
"I think that the system needs to automatically release any
semaphores held by a thread being killed asynchronously?
It seems necessary to me."
UPDATE; The logic enabled when priority inheritance is
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