Multitasking using setjmp, longjmp

GingerJack picture GingerJack · Apr 1, 2010 · Viewed 7.7k times · Source

is there a way to implement multitasking using setjmp and longjmp functions

Answer

Sean Ogden picture Sean Ogden · Mar 21, 2013

You can indeed. There are a couple of ways to accomplish it. The difficult part is initially getting the jmpbufs which point to other stacks. Longjmp is only defined for jmpbuf arguments which were created by setjmp, so there's no way to do this without either using assembly or exploiting undefined behavior. User level threads are inherently not portable, so portability isn't a strong argument for not doing it really.

step 1 You need a place to store the contexts of different threads, so make a queue of jmpbuf stuctures for however many threads you want.

Step 2 You need to malloc a stack for each of these threads.

Step 3 You need to get some jmpbuf contexts which have stack pointers in the memory locations you just allocated. You could inspect the jmpbuf structure on your machine, find out where it stores the stack pointer. Call setjmp and then modify its contents so that the stack pointer is in one of your allocated stacks. Stacks usually grow down, so you probably want your stack pointer somewhere near the highest memory location. If you write a basic C program and use a debugger to disassemble it, and then find instructions it executes when you return from a function, you can find out what the offset ought to be. For example, with system V calling conventions on x86, you'll see that it pops %ebp (the frame pointer) and then calls ret which pops the return address off the stack. So on entry into a function, it pushes the return address and frame pointer. Each push moves the stack pointer down by 4 bytes, so you want the stack pointer to start at the high address of the allocated region, -8 bytes (as if you just called a function to get there). We will fill the 8 bytes next.

The other thing you can do is write some very small (one line) inline assembly to manipulate the stack pointer, and then call setjmp. This is actually more portable, because in many systems the pointers in a jmpbuf are mangled for security, so you can't easily modify them.

I haven't tried it, but you might be able to avoid the asm by just deliberately overflowing the stack by declaring a very large array and thus moving the stack pointer.

Step 4 You need exiting threads to return the system to some safe state. If you don't do this, and one of the threads returns, it will take the address right above your allocated stack as a return address and jump to some garbage location and likely segfault. So first you need a safe place to return to. Get this by calling setjmp in the main thread and storing the jmpbuf in a globally accessible location. Define a function which takes no arguments and just calls longjmp with the saved global jmpbuf. Get the address of that function and copy it to your allocated stacks where you left room for the return address. You can leave the frame pointer empty. Now, when a thread returns, it will go to that function which calls longjmp, and jump right back into the main thread where you called setjmp, every time.

Step 5 Right after the main thread's setjmp, you want to have some code that determines which thread to jump to next, pulling the appropriate jmpbuf off the queue and calling longjmp to go there. When there are no threads left in that queue, the program is done.

Step 6 Write a context switch function which calls setjmp and stores the current state back on the queue, and then longjmp on another jmpbuf from the queue.

Conclusion That's the basics. As long as threads keep calling context switch, the queue keeps getting repopulated, and different threads run. When a thread returns, if there are any left to run, one is chosen by the main thread, and if none are left, the process terminates. With relatively little code you can have a pretty basic cooperative multitasking setup. There are more things you probably want to do, like implement a cleanup function to free the stack of a dead thread, etc. You can also implement preemption using signals, but that is much more difficult because setjmp doesn't save the floating point register state or the flags registers, which are necessary when the program is interrupted asynchronously.