In both parse.c and qstr.c, an internal chunking allocator tidies up
by calling m_renew to shrink an allocated chunk to the size used, and
assumes that the chunk will not move. However, when MICROPY_ENABLE_GC
is false, m_renew calls the system realloc, which does not guarantee
this behaviour. Environments where realloc may return a different
pointer include:
(1) mbed-os with MBED_HEAP_STATS_ENABLED (which adds a wrapper around
malloc & friends; this is where I was hit by the bug);
(2) valgrind on linux (how I diagnosed it).
The fix is to call m_renew_maybe with allow_move=false.
When there're C files to be (re)compiled, they're all passed first to
preprocessor. QSTR references are extracted from preprocessed output and
split per original C file. Then all available qstr files (including those
generated previously) are catenated together. Only if the resulting content
has changed, the output file is written (causing almost global rebuild
to pick up potentially renumbered qstr's). Otherwise, it's not updated
to not cause spurious rebuilds. Related make rules are split to minimize
amount of commands executed in the interim case (when some C files were
updated, but no qstrs were changed).
The config variable MICROPY_MODULE_FROZEN is now made of two separate
parts: MICROPY_MODULE_FROZEN_STR and MICROPY_MODULE_FROZEN_MPY. This
allows to have none, either or both of frozen strings and frozen mpy
files (aka frozen bytecode).
This patch makes configurable, via MICROPY_QSTR_BYTES_IN_HASH, the
number of bytes used for a qstr hash. It was originally fixed at 2
bytes, and now defaults to 2 bytes. Setting it to 1 byte will save
ROM and RAM at a small expense of hash collisions.
Previous to this patch all interned strings lived in their own malloc'd
chunk. On average this wastes N/2 bytes per interned string, where N is
the number-of-bytes for a quanta of the memory allocator (16 bytes on 32
bit archs).
With this patch interned strings are concatenated into the same malloc'd
chunk when possible. Such chunks are enlarged inplace when possible,
and shrunk to fit when a new chunk is needed.
RAM savings with this patch are highly varied, but should always show an
improvement (unless only 3 or 4 strings are interned). New version
typically uses about 70% of previous memory for the qstr data, and can
lead to savings of around 10% of total memory footprint of a running
script.
Costs about 120 bytes code size on Thumb2 archs (depends on how many
calls to gc_realloc are made).
Previously to this patch all constant string/bytes objects were
interned by the compiler, and this lead to crashes when the qstr was too
long (noticeable now that qstr length storage defaults to 1 byte).
With this patch, long string/bytes objects are never interned, and are
referenced directly as constant objects within generated code using
load_const_obj.
This new config option sets how many fixed-number-of-bytes to use to
store the length of each qstr. Previously this was hard coded to 2,
but, as per issue #1056, this is considered overkill since no-one
needs identifiers longer than 255 bytes.
With this patch the number of bytes for the length is configurable, and
defaults to 1 byte. The configuration option filters through to the
makeqstrdata.py script.
Code size savings going from 2 to 1 byte:
- unix x64 down by 592 bytes
- stmhal down by 1148 bytes
- bare-arm down by 284 bytes
Also has RAM savings, and will be slightly more efficient in execution.
This patch consolidates all global variables in py/ core into one place,
in a global structure. Root pointers are all located together to make
GC tracing easier and more efficient.
gc.enable/disable are now the same as CPython: they just control whether
automatic garbage collection is enabled or not. If disabled, you can
still allocate heap memory, and initiate a manual collection.
Colin Hogben
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky