This patch introduces the MICROPY_ENABLE_PYSTACK option (disabled by
default) which enables a "Python stack" that allows to allocate and free
memory in a scoped, or Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) way, similar to alloca().
A new memory allocation API is introduced along with this Py-stack. It
includes both "local" and "nonlocal" LIFO allocation. Local allocation is
intended to be equivalent to using alloca(), whereby the same function must
free the memory. Nonlocal allocation is where another function may free
the memory, so long as it's still LIFO.
Follow-up patches will convert all uses of alloca() and VLA to the new
scoped allocation API. The old behaviour (using alloca()) will still be
available, but when MICROPY_ENABLE_PYSTACK is enabled then alloca() is no
longer required or used.
The benefits of enabling this option are (or will be once subsequent
patches are made to convert alloca()/VLA):
- Toolchains without alloca() can use this feature to obtain correct and
efficient scoped memory allocation (compared to using the heap instead
of alloca(), which is slower).
- Even if alloca() is available, enabling the Py-stack gives slightly more
efficient use of stack space when calling nested Python functions, due to
the way that compilers implement alloca().
- Enabling the Py-stack with the stackless mode allows for even more
efficient stack usage, as well as retaining high performance (because the
heap is no longer used to build and destroy stackless code states).
- With Py-stack and stackless enabled, Python-calling-Python is no longer
recursive in the C mp_execute_bytecode function.
The micropython.pystack_use() function is included to measure usage of the
Python stack.
This function was implemented as an experiment, and was enabled only in
unix port. To remind, it allows to access arbitrary files frozen as
source modules (vs bytecode).
However, further experimentation showed that the same functionality can
be implemented with frozen bytecode. The process requires more steps, but
with suitable toolset it doesn't matter patch. This process is:
1. Convert binary files into "Python resource module" with
tools/mpy_bin2res.py.
2. Freeze as the bytecode.
3. Use micropython-lib's pkg_resources.resource_stream() to access it.
In other words, the extra step is using tools/mpy_bin2res.py (because
there would be wrapper for uio.resource_stream() anyway).
Going frozen bytecode route allows more flexibility, and same/additional
efficiency:
1. Frozen source support can be disabled altogether for additional code
savings.
2. Resources could be also accessed as a buffer, not just as a stream.
There're few caveats too:
1. It wasn't actually profiled the overhead of storing a resource in
"Python resource module" vs storing it directly, but it's assumed that
overhead is small.
2. The "efficiency" claim above applies to the case when resource
file is frozen as the bytecode. If it's not, it actually will take a
lot of RAM on loading. But in this case, the resource file should not
be used (i.e. generated) in the first place, and micropython-lib's
pkg_resources.resource_stream() implementation has the appropriate
fallback to read the raw files instead. This still poses some distribution
issues, e.g. to deployable to baremetal ports (which almost certainly
would require freezeing as the bytecode), a distribution package should
include the resource module. But for non-freezing deployment, presense
of resource module will lead to memory inefficiency.
All the discussion above reminds why uio.resource_stream() was implemented
in the first place - to address some of the issues above. However, since
then, frozen bytecode approach seems to prevail, so, while there're still
some issues to address with it, this change is being made.
This change saves 488 bytes for the unix x86_64 port.
This target removes any stray files (i.e. something not committed to git)
from scripts/ and modules/ dirs (or whatever FROZEN_DIR and FROZEN_MPY_DIR
is set to).
The expected workflow is:
1. make clean-frozen
2. micropython -m upip -p modules <packages_to_freeze>
3. make
As it can be expected that people may drop random thing in those dirs which
they can miss later, the content is actually backed up before cleaning.
This is second part of fun_bc_call() vs mp_obj_fun_bc_prepare_codestate()
common code refactor. This factors out code to initialize codestate
object. After this patch, mp_obj_fun_bc_prepare_codestate() is effectively
DECODE_CODESTATE_SIZE() followed by allocation followed by
INIT_CODESTATE(), and fun_bc_call() starts with that too.
fun_bc_call() starts with almost the same code as
mp_obj_fun_bc_prepare_codestate(), the only difference is a way to
allocate the codestate object (heap vs stack with heap fallback).
Still, would be nice to avoid code duplication to make further
refactoring easier.
So, this commit factors out the common code before the allocation -
decoding and calculating codestate size. It produces two values,
so structured as a macro which writes to 2 variables passed as
arguments.
The assembler back-end for most architectures needs to know if a jump is
backwards in order to emit optimised machine code, and they do this by
checking if the destination label has been set or not. So always reset
label offsets to -1 (this reverts partially the previous commit, with some
minor optimisation for the if-logic with the pass variable).
Clearing the labels to -1 is purely a debugging measure. For release
builds there is no need to do it as the label offset table should always
have the correct value assigned.
Accessing them will crash immediately instead still working for some time,
until overwritten by some other data, leading to much less deterministic
crashes.
This is mostly a workaround for forceful rebuilding of mpy-cross on every
codebase change. If this file has debug logging enabled (by patching),
mpy-cross build failed.
Before that, the output was truncated to 32 bits. Only "%x" format is
handled, because a typical use is for addresses.
This refactor actually decreased x86_64 code size by 30 bytes.
This allows the function to raise an exception when unknown keyword args
are passed in. This patch also reduces code size by (in bytes):
bare-arm: -24
minimal x86: -76
unix x64: -56
unix nanbox: -84
stm32: -40
esp8266: -68
cc3200: -48
Furthermore, this patch adds space (" ") to the set of ROM qstrs which
means it doesn't need to be put in RAM if it's ever used.
Return the result of called function. If exception happened, return
MP_OBJ_NULL. Allows to use mp_call_function_*_protected() with callbacks
returning values, etc.
This commit essentially reverts aa9dbb1b03
where this if-condition was added. It seems that even when that commit
was made the code was never reached by any tests, nor reachable by
analysis (see below). The same is true with the code as it currently
stands: no test triggers this if-condition, nor any uasyncio examples.
Analysing the flow of the program also shows that it's not reachable:
==START==
-> to trigger this if condition mp_execute_bytecode() must return
MP_VM_RETURN_YIELD with *sp==MP_OBJ_STOP_ITERATION
-> mp_execute_bytecode() can only return MP_VM_RETURN_YIELD from the
MP_BC_YIELD_VALUE bytecode, which can happen in 2 ways:
-> 1) from a "yield <x>" in bytecode, but <x> must always be a proper
object, never MP_OBJ_STOP_ITERATION; ==END1==
-> 2) via yield from, via mp_resume() which must return
MP_VM_RETURN_YIELD with ret_value==MP_OBJ_STOP_ITERATION, which
can happen in 3 ways:
-> 1) it delegates to mp_obj_gen_resume(); go back to ==START==
-> 2) it returns MP_VM_RETURN_YIELD directly but with a guard that
ret_val!=MP_OBJ_STOP_ITERATION; ==END2==
-> 3) it returns MP_VM_RETURN_YIELD with ret_val set from
mp_call_method_n_kw(), but mp_call_method_n_kw() must return a
proper object, never MP_OBJ_STOP_ITERATION; ==END3==
The above shows there is no way to trigger the if-condition and it can be
removed.
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky