[Vm-dev] Pharo FFI on aarch64/arm64

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Fri Mar 15 03:21:49 UTC 2019


Hi Ken,

On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 2:09 PM <ken.dickey at whidbey.com> wrote:

>  Greetings,
>
> I have been making small progress in getting Pharo's FFI unit tests to
> pass on arm64.
>
> Built from recent
>    OpenSmalltalk opensmalltalk-vm build.linux64ARMv8/pharo.stack.spur
>
> I get a pharo vm whose UI is pretty slow (no JIT so far), so current
> progress is slow.
>
> I am looking at #FFICallbackThunk>initializeARM32 but I don't yet
> understand quite what this code is trying to do, so have not made proper
> changes for arm64.
>
> Anybody care to join in or advise me on this?
>
> Note that I am neither a Pharo nor a UnifiedFFI user, so I may be making
> really dumb mistakes at this point (i.e. _you_ could help me out here!
> 8^).
>

Oops!  I should have directed your attention to the comment for Callback
that I wrote back in September of 2016:

Callbacks encapsulate callbacks from the outside world.  They allow
Smalltalk blocks to be evaluated and answer their results to external (e.g.
C) callees.  Callbacks are created with signature:block:, e.g.

cb := Callback
signature:  #(int (*)(const void *, const void *))
block: [ :arg1 :arg2 | ((arg1 doubleAt: 1) - (arg2 doubleAt: 1)) sign].

and passed through the FFI by passing their pointer, e.g.

self qui: data ck: data size so: 8 rt: cb pointer

When the callback is made, the system arranges that the block is invoked
with the arguments as defined by the signature, and the result of the block
passed back, again as defined by the signature.  See methods in the
signatures protocol in subclasses of Callback for signature methods that
decode the C stack and registers to invoke a callback with parsed
arguments.  See Callback>>valueInContext: and subclass implementations for
the evaluation of the signature method that invokes the callback block with
correctly parsed arguments.  See Alien class>>invokeCallbackContext: for
the entry-point for callbacks into the system from the VM.

Instance Variables:
block <BlockClosure> - The Smalltalk code to be run in response to external
code invoking the callback.
thunk <FFICallbackThunk> - the wrapper around the machine-code thunk that
initiates the callback and whose address should be passed to C
evaluator <Symbol> - the selector of the marshalling method to use; see
methods in the signatures protocol in subclasses of Callback.
numEvaluatorArgs <Integer> - the arity of evaluator
argsProxyClass <Alien subclass> - legacy; unused; the wrapper around the
thunk's incoming stack pointer, used to extract arguments from the stack.

Class Variables:
ThunkToCallbackMap <Dictionary of: thunkAddress <Integer> -> callback
<Callback>> - used to lookup the Callback associated with a specific thunk
address on callback.  See FFICallbackThunk.
ABI <String> - the name of the current ABI

Class Instance Variables
concreteClass <Callback subclass> - the concrete class for callbacks on the
current platform, or nil if one doesn't yet exist.

Implementation:
The way that it works is in two parts
- on callback the VM passes up a pointer to a structure from which all
arguments, stacked and in registers (because the VM has copied any register
args into the struct) can be accessed, and through which the result can be
returned.
- the image level provides marshalling methods that match the signature in
the callback.  Marshalling methods belong in concrete subclasses, one
subclass for each ABI.

So e.g. with a callback of
Callback
signature:  #(int (*)(const void *, const void *))
block: [ :arg1 :arg2 | ((arg1 doubleAt: 1) - (arg2 doubleAt: 1)) sign]
the marshalling methods are in one of Callback's concrete subclasses
signatures protocol, for example

CallbackForIA32>>voidstarvoidstarRetint: callbackContext sp: spAlien
<signature: #(int (*)(const void *, const void *))>
^callbackContext wordResult:
(block
value: (Alien forPointer: (spAlien unsignedLongAt: 1))
value: (Alien forPointer: (spAlien unsignedLongAt: 5)))

where spAlien is an Alien pointing to a VMCallbackContext32.

For ARM support, where there the first four integer arguments are passed in
registers, we can use

CallbackForARM32>>voidstarvoidstarRetint: callbackContext regs: regsAlien
<signature: #(int (*)(const void *, const void *))>
^callbackContext wordResult:
(block
value: (Alien forPointer: (regsAlien unsignedLongAt: 1))
value: (Alien forPointer: (regsAlien unsignedLongAt: 5)))

The selector of the method doesn't matter, providing it doesn't conflict
with any other, except for the number of arguments.  What's important is
the pragma which defines the signature and the ABI for which this is a
valid marshalling method.  Support for callee pop callbacks (Pascal calling
convention such as the Win32 stdcall: convention) are supported using the
<calleepops: N> pragma which specifies how many bytes to pop.

When a callback is instantiated, Callback introspects to find the
marshalling method that matches the signature for the current ABI.  If one
doesn't already exist you can write one.  Hopefully we'll write an ABI
compiler that will automatically generate these marshalling methods
according to the platform's ABI, but for now its a manual process.; at
least it's open and flexible.  When the callback is invoked the evaluator
is performed with the current callbackContext and pointer(s) to the
arguments.  There is a 32-bit and a 64-bit callback context, and it can
have a stack pointer, integer register args and floating point register
args, so it's general enough for any callback.

To pass back the result, a value is assigned into the struct via the
accessor in the marshalling method and control returns to teh point where
teh callback comes in, and this uses a primitive to return.  Inside the
callbackContext is a jmpbuf from a setjmp.  The primitive longjmp's back to
the entry point in the VM which extracts the result and the code for the
kind of result and returns.  See Callback class>>invokeCallbackContext:


> Thanks much in advance,
> -KenD
>

_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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