newlib/winsup/doc/highlights.xml

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<sect1 id="highlights"><title>Highlights of Cygwin Functionality</title>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-intro"><title>Introduction</title> <para>When a binary linked
against the library is executed, the Cygwin DLL is loaded into the
application's text segment.  Because we are trying to emulate a UNIX kernel
which needs access to all processes running under it, the first Cygwin DLL to
run creates shared memory areas and global synchronization objects that other
processes using separate instances of the DLL can access.  This is used to keep track of open file descriptors and to assist fork and exec, among other
purposes.  Every process also has a per_process structure that contains
information such as process id, user id, signal masks, and other similar
process-specific information.</para>

<para>The DLL is implemented as a standard DLL in the Win32 subsystem.  Under
the hood it's using the Win32 API, as well as the native NT API, where
appropriate.</para>

<note><para>Some restrictions apply for calls to the Win32 API.
For details, see <xref linkend="setup-env-win32"></xref>,
as well as <xref linkend="pathnames-win32-api"></xref>.</para></note>

<para>The native NT API is used mainly for speed, as well as to access
NT capabilities which are useful to implement certain POSIX features, but
are hidden to the Win32 API.
</para>

<para>Due to some restrictions in Windows, it's not always possible
to strictly adhere to existing UNIX standards like POSIX.1.  Fortunately
these are mostly corner cases.</para>

<para>Note that many of the things that Cygwin does to provide POSIX
compatibility do not mesh well with the native Windows API.  If you mix
POSIX calls with Windows calls in your program it is possible that you
will see uneven results.  In particular, Cygwin signals will not work
with Windows functions which block and Windows functions which accept
filenames may be confused by Cygwin's support for long filenames.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-perm"><title>Permissions and Security</title>
<para>Windows NT includes a sophisticated security model based on Access
Control Lists (ACLs).  Cygwin maps Win32 file ownership and permissions to
ACLs by default, on file systems supporting them (usually NTFS).  Solaris
style ACLs and accompanying function calls are also supported.
The chmod call maps UNIX-style permissions back to the Win32 equivalents. 
Because many programs expect to be able to find the
<filename>/etc/passwd</filename> and
<filename>/etc/group</filename> files, we provide <ulink 
url="https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-utils.html">utilities</ulink>
that can be used to construct them from the user and group information
provided by the operating system.</para>

<para>Users with Administrator rights are permitted to chown files.
With version 1.1.3 Cygwin introduced a mechanism for setting real and
effective UIDs. This is described in <xref linkend="ntsec"></xref>.  As
of version 1.5.13, the Cygwin developers are not aware of any feature in
the Cygwin DLL that would allow users to gain privileges or to access
objects to which they have no rights under Windows.  However there is no
guarantee that Cygwin is as secure as the Windows it runs on. Cygwin
processes share some variables and are thus easier targets of denial of
service type of attacks.
</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-files"><title>File Access</title> <para>Cygwin supports
both POSIX- and Win32-style paths, using either forward or back slashes as the
directory delimiter.  Paths coming into the DLL are translated from POSIX to
native NT as needed.  From the application perspective, the file system is
a POSIX-compliant one.  The implementation details are safely hidden in the
Cygwin DLL.  UNC pathnames (starting with two slashes) are supported for
network paths.</para>

<para>The layout of this POSIX view of the Windows file system space is
stored in the <filename>/etc/fstab</filename> file.  Actually, there is a
system-wide <filename>/etc/fstab</filename> file as well as a user-specific
fstab file <filename>/etc/fstab.d/${USER}</filename>.</para>

<para>At startup the DLL has to find out where it can find the
<filename>/etc/fstab</filename> file.  The mechanism used for this is simple.
First it retrieves it's own path, for instance
<filename>C:\Cygwin\bin\cygwin1.dll</filename>.  From there it deduces
that the root path is <filename>C:\Cygwin</filename>.  So it looks for the
<filename>fstab</filename> file in <filename>C:\Cygwin\etc\fstab</filename>. 
The layout of this file is very similar to the layout of the
<filename>fstab</filename> file on Linux.  Just instead of block devices,
the mount points point to Win32 paths.  An installation with
<command>setup.exe</command> installs a <filename>fstab</filename> file by
default, which can easily be changed using the editor of your choice.</para>

<para>The <filename>fstab</filename> file allows mounting arbitrary Win32
paths into the POSIX file system space.  A special case is the so-called
cygdrive prefix.
It's the path under which every available drive in the system is mounted
under its drive letter.  The default value is <filename>/cygdrive</filename>,
so you can access the drives as <filename>/cygdrive/c</filename>,
<filename>/cygdrive/d</filename>, etc...  The cygdrive prefix can be set to
some other value (<filename>/mnt</filename> for instance) in the
<filename>fstab</filename> file(s).</para>

<para>The library exports several Cygwin-specific functions that can be used
by external programs to convert a path or path list from Win32 to POSIX or vice
versa.  Shell scripts and Makefiles cannot call these functions directly.
Instead, they can do the same path translations by executing the
<command>cygpath</command> utility program that we provide with Cygwin.</para>

<para>Win32 applications handle filenames in a case preserving, but case
insensitive manner.  Cygwin supports case sensitivity on file systems
supporting that.  Windows only supports case sensitivity when a specific
registry value is changed.  Therefore, case sensitivity is not usually the
default.</para>

<para>Cygwin supports creating and reading symbolic links, even on Windows
filesystems and OS versions which don't support them.
See <xref linkend="pathnames-symlinks"></xref> for details.</para>

<para>Hard links are fully supported on NTFS and NFS file systems.  On FAT
and other file systems which don't support hardlinks, the call returns with
an error, just like on other POSIX systems.</para>

<para>On file systems which don't support unique persistent file IDs (FAT,
older Samba shares) the inode number for a file is calculated by hashing its
full Win32 path.  The inode number generated by the stat call always matches
the one returned in <literal>d_ino</literal> of the <literal>dirent</literal>
structure.  It is worth noting that the number produced by this method is not
guaranteed to be unique.  However, we have not found this to be a significant
problem because of the low probability of generating a duplicate inode number.
</para>

<para>Cygwin supports Extended Attributes (EAs) via the linux-specific function
calls <function>getxattr</function>, <function>setxattr</function>,
<function>listxattr</function>, and <function>removexattr</function>.  All EAs
on Samba or NTFS are treated as user EAs, so, if the name of an EA is "foo"
from the Windows perspective, it's transformed into "user.foo" within Cygwin.
This allows Linux-compatible EA operations and keeps tools like
<command>attr</command>, or <command>setfattr</command> happy.
</para>

<para><function>chroot</function> is supported.  Kind of.  Chroot is not a
concept known by Windows.  This implies some serious restrictions.  First of
all, the <function>chroot</function> call isn't a privileged call.  Any user
may call it.  Second, the chroot environment isn't safe against native windows
processes.  Given that, chroot in Cygwin is only a hack which pretends security
where there is none.  For that reason the usage of chroot is discouraged.
Don't use it unless you really, really know what you're doing.
</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-textvsbinary"><title>Text Mode vs. Binary Mode</title>
<para>It is often important that files created by native Windows
applications be interoperable with Cygwin applications.  For example, a
file created by a native Windows text editor should be readable by a
Cygwin application, and vice versa.</para>

<para>Unfortunately, UNIX and Win32 have different end-of-line
conventions in text files.  A UNIX text file will have a single newline
character (LF) whereas a Win32 text file will instead use a two
character sequence (CR+LF).  Consequently, the two character sequence
must be translated on the fly by Cygwin into a single character newline
when reading in text mode.</para>

<para>This solution addresses the newline interoperability concern at
the expense of violating the POSIX requirement that text and binary mode
be identical.  Consequently, processes that attempt to lseek through
text files can no longer rely on the number of bytes read to be an
accurate indicator of position within the file.  For this reason, Cygwin
allows you to choose the mode in which a file is read in several ways.</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-ansiclib"><title>ANSI C Library</title>
<para>We chose to include Red Hat's own existing ANSI C library
"newlib" as part of the library, rather than write all of the lib C
and math calls from scratch.  Newlib is a BSD-derived ANSI C library,
previously only used by cross-compilers for embedded systems
development.  Other functions, which are not supported by newlib have
been added to the Cygwin sources using BSD implementations as much as
possible.</para>

<para>The reuse of existing free implementations of such things
as the glob, regexp, and getopt libraries saved us considerable
effort.  In addition, Cygwin uses Doug Lea's free malloc
implementation that successfully balances speed and compactness.  The
library accesses the malloc calls via an exported function pointer.
This makes it possible for a Cygwin process to provide its own
malloc if it so desires.</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-process"><title>Process Creation</title>
<para>The <function>fork</function> call in Cygwin is particularly interesting
because it does not map well on top of the Win32 API.  This makes it very
difficult to implement correctly.  Currently, the Cygwin fork is a
non-copy-on-write implementation similar to what was present in early
flavors of UNIX.</para>

<para>The first thing that happens when a parent process
forks a child process is that the parent initializes a space in the
Cygwin process table for the child.  It then creates a suspended
child process using the Win32 CreateProcess call.  Next, the parent
process calls setjmp to save its own context and sets a pointer to
this in a Cygwin shared memory area (shared among all Cygwin
tasks).  It then fills in the child's .data and .bss sections by
copying from its own address space into the suspended child's address
space.  After the child's address space is initialized, the child is
run while the parent waits on a mutex.  The child discovers it has
been forked and longjumps using the saved jump buffer.  The child then
sets the mutex the parent is waiting on and blocks on another mutex.
This is the signal for the parent to copy its stack and heap into the
child, after which it releases the mutex the child is waiting on and
returns from the fork call.  Finally, the child wakes from blocking on
the last mutex, recreates any memory-mapped areas passed to it via the
shared area, and returns from fork itself.</para>

<para>While we have some
ideas as to how to speed up our fork implementation by reducing the
number of context switches between the parent and child process, fork
will almost certainly always be inefficient under Win32.  Fortunately,
in most circumstances the spawn family of calls provided by Cygwin
can be substituted for a fork/exec pair with only a little effort.
These calls map cleanly on top of the Win32 API.  As a result, they
are much more efficient.  Changing the compiler's driver program to
call spawn instead of fork was a trivial change and increased
compilation speeds by twenty to thirty percent in our
tests.</para>

<para>However, spawn and exec present their own set of
difficulties.  Because there is no way to do an actual exec under
Win32, Cygwin has to invent its own Process IDs (PIDs).  As a
result, when a process performs multiple exec calls, there will be
multiple Windows PIDs associated with a single Cygwin PID.  In some
cases, stubs of each of these Win32 processes may linger, waiting for
their exec'd Cygwin process to exit.</para>
</sect2>

<sect3 id='ov-hi-process-problems'>
<title>Problems with process creation</title>

<para>The semantics of <literal>fork</literal> require that a forked
child process have <emphasis>exactly</emphasis> the same address
space layout as its parent. However, Windows provides no native
support for cloning address space between processes and several
features actively undermine a reliable <literal>fork</literal>
implementation. Three issues are especially prevalent:</para>

<itemizedlist mark="bullet">

<listitem><para>DLL base address collisions. Unlike *nix shared
libraries, which use "position-independent code", Windows shared
libraries assume a fixed base address. Whenever the hard-wired
address ranges of two DLLs collide (which occurs quite often), the
Windows loader must "rebase" one of them to a different
address. However, it may not resolve collisions consistently, and
may rebase a different dll and/or move it to a different address
every time. Cygwin can usually compensate for this effect when it
involves libraries opened dynamically, but collisions among
statically-linked dlls (dependencies known at compile time) are
resolved before <literal>cygwin1.dll</literal> initializes and
cannot be fixed afterward. This problem can only be solved by
removing the base address conflicts which cause the problem,
usually using the <literal>rebaseall</literal> tool.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Address space layout randomization (ASLR). Starting with
Vista, Windows implements ASLR, which means that thread stacks,
heap, memory-mapped files, and statically-linked dlls are placed
at different (random) locations in each process. This behaviour
interferes with a proper <literal>fork</literal>, and if an
unmovable object (process heap or system dll) ends up at the wrong
location, Cygwin can do nothing to compensate (though it will
retry a few times automatically).</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>DLL injection by
<ulink url="https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda">
BLODA</ulink>. Badly-behaved applications which
inject dlls into other processes often manage to clobber important
sections of the child's address space, leading to base address
collisions which rebasing cannot fix. The only way to resolve this
problem is to remove (usually uninstall) the offending app.</para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

<para>In summary, current Windows implementations make it
impossible to implement a perfectly reliable fork, and occasional
fork failures are inevitable.
</para>

</sect3>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-signals"><title>Signals</title>
<para>When
a Cygwin process starts, the library starts a secondary thread for
use in signal handling.  This thread waits for Windows events used to
pass signals to the process.  When a process notices it has a signal,
it scans its signal bitmask and handles the signal in the appropriate
fashion.</para>

<para>Several complications in the implementation arise from the
fact that the signal handler operates in the same address space as the
executing program.  The immediate consequence is that Cygwin system
functions are interruptible unless special care is taken to avoid
this.   We go to some lengths to prevent the sig_send function that
sends signals from being interrupted.  In the case of a process
sending a signal to another process, we place a mutex around sig_send
such that sig_send will not be interrupted until it has completely
finished sending the signal.</para>

<para>In the case of a process sending
itself a signal, we use a separate semaphore/event pair instead of the
mutex.  sig_send starts by resetting the event and incrementing the
semaphore that flags the signal handler to process the signal.  After
the signal is processed, the signal handler signals the event that it
is done.  This process keeps intraprocess signals synchronous, as
required by POSIX.</para>

<para>Most standard UNIX signals are provided.  Job
control works as expected in shells that support
it.</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-sockets"><title>Sockets</title>
<para>Socket-related calls in Cygwin basically call the functions by the
same name in Winsock, Microsoft's implementation of Berkeley sockets, but
with lots of tweaks.  All sockets are non-blocking under the hood to allow
to interrupt blocking calls by POSIX signals.  Additional bookkeeping is
necessary to implement correct socket sharing POSIX semantics and especially
for the select call.  Some socket-related functions are not implemented at
all in Winsock, as, for example, socketpair.  Starting with Windows Vista,
Microsoft removed the legacy calls <function>rcmd(3)</function>,
<function>rexec(3)</function> and <function>rresvport(3)</function>.
Recent versions of Cygwin now implement all these calls internally.</para>

<para>An especially troublesome feature of Winsock is that it must be
initialized before the first socket function is called.  As a result, Cygwin
has to perform this initialization on the fly, as soon as the first
socket-related function is called by the application.  In order to support
sockets across fork calls, child processes initialize Winsock if any
inherited file descriptor is a socket.</para>

<para>AF_UNIX (AF_LOCAL) sockets are not available in Winsock.  They are
implemented in Cygwin by using local AF_INET sockets instead.  This is
completely transparent to the application.  Cygwin's implementation also
supports the getpeereid BSD extension.  However, Cygwin does not yet support
descriptor passing.</para>

</sect2>

<sect2 id="ov-hi-select"><title>Select</title>
<para>The UNIX <function>select</function> function is another
call that does not map cleanly on top of the Win32 API.  Much to our
dismay, we discovered that the Win32 select in Winsock only worked on
socket handles.  Our implementation allows select to function normally
when given different types of file descriptors (sockets, pipes,
handles, and a custom /dev/windows Windows messages
pseudo-device).</para>

<para>Upon entry into the select function, the first
operation is to sort the file descriptors into the different types.
There are then two cases to consider.  The simple case is when at
least one file descriptor is a type that is always known to be ready
(such as a disk file).  In that case, select returns immediately as
soon as it has polled each of the other types to see if they are
ready.  The more complex case involves waiting for socket or pipe file
descriptors to be ready.  This is accomplished by the main thread
suspending itself, after starting one thread for each type of file
descriptor present.  Each thread polls the file descriptors of its
respective type with the appropriate Win32 API call.  As soon as a
thread identifies a ready descriptor, that thread signals the main
thread to wake up.  This case is now the same as the first one since
we know at least one descriptor is ready.  So select returns, after
polling all of the file descriptors one last time.</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>