This patch replaces the former prominent use of pointers by references
wherever feasible. This has the following benefits:
* The contract between caller and callee becomes more obvious. When
passing a reference, the contract says that the argument cannot be
a null pointer. The caller is responsible to ensure that. Therefore,
the use of reference eliminates the need to add defensive null-pointer
checks at the callee site, which sometimes merely exist to be on the
safe side. The bottom line is that the code becomes easier to follow.
* Reference members must be initialized via an object initializer,
which promotes a programming style that avoids intermediate object-
construction states. Within core, there are still a few pointers
as member variables left though. E.g., caused by the late association
of 'Platform_thread' objects with their 'Platform_pd' objects.
* If no pointers are present as member variables, we don't need to
manually provide declarations of a private copy constructor and
an assignment operator to avoid -Weffc++ errors "class ... has
pointer data members [-Werror=effc++]".
This patch also changes a few system bindings on NOVA and Fiasco.OC,
e.g., the return value of the global 'cap_map' accessor has become a
reference. Hence, the patch touches a few places outside of core.
Fixes#3135
The patch adjust the code of the base, base-<kernel>, and os repository.
To adapt existing components to fix violations of the best practices
suggested by "Effective C++" as reported by the -Weffc++ compiler
argument. The changes follow the patterns outlined below:
* A class with virtual functions can no longer publicly inherit base
classed without a vtable. The inherited object may either be moved
to a member variable, or inherited privately. The latter would be
used for classes that inherit 'List::Element' or 'Avl_node'. In order
to enable the 'List' and 'Avl_tree' to access the meta data, the
'List' must become a friend.
* Instead of adding a virtual destructor to abstract base classes,
we inherit the new 'Interface' class, which contains a virtual
destructor. This way, single-line abstract base classes can stay
as compact as they are now. The 'Interface' utility resides in
base/include/util/interface.h.
* With the new warnings enabled, all member variables must be explicitly
initialized. Basic types may be initialized with '='. All other types
are initialized with braces '{ ... }' or as class initializers. If
basic types and non-basic types appear in a row, it is nice to only
use the brace syntax (also for basic types) and align the braces.
* If a class contains pointers as members, it must now also provide a
copy constructor and assignment operator. In the most cases, one
would make them private, effectively disallowing the objects to be
copied. Unfortunately, this warning cannot be fixed be inheriting
our existing 'Noncopyable' class (the compiler fails to detect that
the inheriting class cannot be copied and still gives the error).
For now, we have to manually add declarations for both the copy
constructor and assignment operator as private class members. Those
declarations should be prepended with a comment like this:
/*
* Noncopyable
*/
Thread(Thread const &);
Thread &operator = (Thread const &);
In the future, we should revisit these places and try to replace
the pointers with references. In the presence of at least one
reference member, the compiler would no longer implicitly generate
a copy constructor. So we could remove the manual declaration.
Issue #465
This patch replaces the former 'Pd_session::bind_thread' function by a
PD-capability argument of the 'Cpu_session::create_thread' function, and
removes the ancient thread-start protocol via 'Rm_session::add_client' and
'Cpu_session::set_pager'. Threads are now bound to PDs at their creation
time and implicitly paged according to the address space of the PD.
Note the API change:
This patch changes the signature of the 'Child' and 'Process' constructors.
There is a new 'address_space' argument, which represents the region map
representing the child's address space. It is supplied separately to the
PD session capability (which principally can be invoked to obtain the
PD's address space) to allow the population of the address space
without relying on an 'Pd_session::address_space' RPC call.
Furthermore, a new (optional) env_pd argument allows the explicit
overriding of the PD capability handed out to the child as part of its
environment. It can be used to intercept the interaction of the child
with its PD session at core. This is used by Noux.
Issue #1938
This patch integrates three region maps into each PD session to
reduce the session overhead and to simplify the PD creation procedure.
Please refer to the issue cited below for an elaborative discussion.
Note the API change:
With this patch, the semantics of core's RM service have changed. Now,
the service is merely a tool for creating and destroying managed
dataspaces, which are rarely needed. Regular components no longer need a
RM session. For this reason, the corresponding argument for the
'Process' and 'Child' constructors has been removed.
The former interface of the 'Rm_session' is not named 'Region_map'. As a
minor refinement, the 'Fault_type' enum values are now part of the
'Region_map::State' struct.
Issue #1938
Norman Feske
Alexander Boettcher
Stefan Kalkowski