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.TH UTCB 7 2009-11-02 "Codezero" "Codezero Programmer's Manual"

.SH NAME

.nf

.BR "UTCB" " - Userspace Thread Control Block"

.SH SYNOPSIS

.B #include 

.fi

.SH DESCRIPTION

UTCB is a per-thread data structure designated as thread local storage for IPC message registers and private data. The UTCB area in a thread's address space is a virtual address region that is unique for each thread available on the system. It is discovered at run-time by reading the

.BR "Kernel Interface Page"

utcb field.

The UTCB stores message registers that are transferred between threads during an IPC. Depending on whether the IPC is a send or a receive, the message register fields are either transferred to other threads, or overwritten by message registers of other threads. For details on IPC behaviour please refer to the

.BR l4_ipc ()

system call reference page.

.RI "UTCB may also be used for any thread-local information that is private to each thread in an address space. For example on stacked IPCs where a new IPC is initiated before the current IPC has been completed, " "saved_tag " "and " "saved_sender " "fields serve the purpose of saving the unfinished IPC information. For a full description of each field please refer to below. "

.fi

.nf

.B struct utcb {

.BI "      u32 "  "mr[MR_TOTAL]" ";       /* MRs that are mapped to real registers */"

.BI "      u32 "  "saved_tag" ";          /* Saved tag field for stacked ipc */"

.BI "      u32 "  "saved_sender" ";       /* Saved sender field for stacked ipc */"

.BI "      u32 "  "mr_rest[MR_REST]" ";   /* Complete the utcb to 64 words */"

};

.TP

.fi

.I mr[MR_TOTAL]

.RB "Primary message registers. On the ARM Architecture there are 6 of these registers, named as " "MR0 - MR5" ". As an optimisation, these registers may be mapped to real registers by the kernel during an ipc. However this behaviour is not warranted by the kernel API."

.TP

.fi

.I saved_tag

Saved IPC tag field on a stacked IPC.

.TP

.fi

.I saved_sender

Saved sender id on a stacked IPC.

.TP

.fi

.I mr_rest[MR_REST]

.RB "Rest of the message registers located on the UTCB. These registers are transferred upon an ipc only if the ipc type is a " "full ipc" ". See " "l4_ipc" "(7) for more details."

.SH UTCB ALLOCATION

UTCB address and memory allocation is not maintained by Codezero Microkernel. Both UTCB allocation and maintainence is expected to be handled in userspace.

As an example, a pager for a group of threads may use the UTCB management functions to allocate and manage multiple UTCBs. This would be a more complicated but well-addressed approach, since this library would maintain multiple utcb areas across different address spaces, and differentiate between address spaces upon allocation. Otherwise a single address space multi-threaded application may simply use a pool of memory and virtual addresses to manage per-thread UTCB areas.

UTCB addresses may be any virtual address, however there is a restriction that the utcb address region must lie in a disjoint virtual memory region. This is required because when an IPC is established, the kernel does a direct copy between UTCB regions, without the need for page-table manipulation.

The simplest solution to create a UTCB is to simply declare a UTCB size aligned array of utcb structures statically by the below macro:

.BI "#define DECLARE_UTCB(" name ")

.B struct utcb name ALIGN(sizeof(struct utcb))

and use it by:

.B DECLARE_UTCB(utcb);

While this works, it requires the statically allocated structure to lie in a virtual address area that is disjoint from any other virtual address in the system.

.RB "Pagers may set a thread's utcb by the " "l4_exchange_registers() " "system call. Please see " "l4_exchange_registers" "(7) for more details."

.fi

The UTCB structure may be of variable size, and has been set to a total of 256 bytes on an ARM system. The UTCB structure is subject to change. New fields may be reserved on the UTCB as needed.

.in 8

.SH L4 USERSPACE LIBRARY

.nf

/* Functions to read/write utcb registers */

.BI "static inline unsigned int read_mr(int " "offset");

.BI "static inline void write_mr(unsigned int " "offset" ", unsigned int " "val" ")"

.SH SEE ALSO

.BR "l4_ipc"(7), " l4_exchange_registers"(7)