smarm/task.md

smarm — task.md (next steps)

Handoff for a future session reusing this sandbox. Read top to bottom once before starting; the gotchas section is hard-won and will save you a faceplant.

Resume the environment

• Repo: smarm. Two branches (the old single arm-port stack was split):
  • master — the mainline, and HEAD. Carries roadmap #1–#5: cooperative cancellation, supervisor strategies (one_for_one/all, rest_for_one) + the orphaned-timer shutdown fix, links/trap_exit, selective receive, gen_server, and demonitor/MonitorId. Tagged v0.4.0. x86-64 Linux only.
  • arm-port — master plus a single commit: feat(arch): aarch64 context switch + cycle counter. Extracts the x86-64 context-switch / stack-init / cycle-counter out of context.rs into a target_arch-gated src/arch/ (x86_64 + aarch64 backends) and adds an AAPCS64 backend. ⚠️ UNTESTED: never built or run on real ARM hardware. The x86-64 path is unchanged (arch/x86_64.rs is the old context.rs body verbatim), so the x86 suite passing says nothing about the aarch64 backend. Build + test on-device before trusting it.
• Toolchain is installed but NOT on PATH in a fresh shell. First line of every session: . "$HOME/.cargo/env" (rustc/cargo 1.96).
• Build cargo build · all tests cargo test · one suite cargo test --test monitor.
• Bench probe cargo bench --bench general (custom print-only harness; compiles tokio in release the first time — slow — but target/ persists across git checkouts so it's paid once).
• Perf regression check: git checkout <pre-change-sha> → cargo bench --bench general | tee before.txt → git checkout arm-port → run again → diff the smarm 1-thread medians for chained_spawn and yield_many (those exercise spawn/finalize/scheduler). Numbers are noisy on this shared CPU; treat as "regression beyond noise?" not a precise delta.

Roadmap (dependency order)

1. Cooperative cancellation — the keystone ✅ DONE (a8ddb4a)

Everything below (one_for_all/rest_for_one, links) needs a safe way to stop a running peer. Forcible teardown of another green thread's stack is unsound here (shared heap + Drop). So: cooperative stop the actor observes and unwinds itself.

Shipped as designed (sentinel unwind, not Result-threading). Notes for what came next / future readers:

• Stop flag lives on Actor behind Arc<AtomicBool> (fresh per spawn), NOT a Slot field — sidesteps the three-place reset, at the cost of one small alloc per spawn. The scheduler hands the resume path a raw *const AtomicBool (no per-resume refcount traffic); yield_many bench stayed at baseline, chained_spawn ~+6% from that alloc (left as-is; move to a Slot field if it ever matters).

• Observation points: amortised maybe_preempt/check!() path + the wakeup side of park_current/yield_now. Sentinel = StopSentinel (zero-size), recognised in the trampoline → Outcome::Stopped. join() on a stopped actor returns Ok(()) (no payload to propagate; reason is on the monitor channel).

• Documented gaps confirmed by tests: no-observation-point loop can't be stopped (same as preemption); a user catch_unwind can swallow the sentinel but the flag stays set so the next yield re-raises.

  Original plan, for reference:

• Add a per-actor stop flag (Slot field + atomic, or check via shared state).

• request_stop(pid): set the flag, unpark if parked.

• Realize the stop as a controlled unwind: when the scheduler resumes a stop-requested actor, inject a sentinel panic (dedicated payload type) so the existing trampoline catch_unwind tears the stack down and runs Drop. The trampoline recognizes the sentinel and reports a new Outcome::Stopped (distinct from a user Panic). This avoids changing every blocking-op signature.

  • Alternative considered: thread Result<_, Cancelled> through recv/sleep/ lock/io. Rejected — large API churn. Go with the sentinel unwind.
  • Caveat to document: user code with its own catch_unwind can swallow the sentinel (cf. Erlang catch); re-check the flag at the next yield and/or re-raise. And a tight no-alloc loop without check!() can't be stopped — same inherent limitation as preemption.

• Observation points: maybe_preempt()/check!() (cheap flag check) and the blocking parks (recv/sleep/mutex/io) on the stop-driven unpark.

• Tests: looping actor on check!() gets stopped → Outcome::Stopped, Drop guards ran; parked-on-recv actor gets stopped; no-check loop documents the gap.

2. one_for_all / rest_for_one + ordered shutdown ✅ DONE (351dc9c)

Shipped. What landed vs the plan:

• Strategy::{OneForOne,OneForAll,RestForOne} selected via .strategy(), default OneForOne. The struct keeps the OneForOne name (compat; existing tests untouched) — a rename to Supervisor is a deferred refactor.

• The triggering child's Restart policy decides whether anything restarts; the strategy decides which live siblings are cycled (all / index-> after the failed one). Survivors are request_stop'd in reverse start order, awaited on the existing supervisor_channel funnel (no new channel, no select), restarted in start order. One failure = one intensity tick regardless of group size. Out-of-band signals during an await are stashed and replayed.

• Signal::Stopped(pid) + DownReason::Stopped added (kept distinct from Exit, as planned). A Stopped signal counts as abnormal for the restart decision.

• Ordered shutdown: on cap-trip / mailbox-close-with-survivors, stop remaining children in reverse start order and await them (no-op on the normal exit).

• ⚠️ Surfaced + fixed a latent keystone bug (e80334b): a cancelled sleeping/timeout actor orphans its timer entry, and the scheduler's shutdown check counted pending timers → run() hung until the dead actor's deadline fired (a sleep(30s) sleeper hung shutdown 30s). Fix: timers no longer gate shutdown (live == 0 already implies nothing a timer could wake); heap is cleared on exit. Independent of the supervisor work.

• Tests: all-restart (sibling cycled despite clean exit), suffix-restart (prefix child left alone), reverse-order teardown.

  Original plan, for reference:

• one_for_all: on any child failure, request_stop all siblings, await their termination signals, restart all per spec.

• rest_for_one: stop+restart the failed child and those started after it.

• Supervisor shutdown: stop children in reverse start order.

• Decide signal surface: add Signal::Stopped(pid) + DownReason::Stopped rather than folding into Exit (clearer for the supervisor's await logic).

• Tests: all-restart, suffix-restart, reverse-order shutdown.

3. Links + trap_exit ✅ DONE (6581484)

• Slot.links: Vec<Pid> (bidirectional); link/unlink; trap_exit() flag lives on Actor (fresh per spawn → a restarted child starts un-trapped, and no fourth slot-reset site).
• On finalize, reverse links are cleared under the lock (always — keeps the cascade acyclic), then for each linked peer: abnormal death (Panic/ Stopped) → request_stop(peer) unless peer traps, in which case deliver an ExitSignal message instead. Normal exit does NOT propagate. Linking an already-dead pid delivers an immediate NoProc signal (message if trapping, else request_stop(self) — not a silent no-op).
• Resolved: the trap inbox is a dedicated channel (trap_exit() -> Receiver<ExitSignal>), distinct from the monitor Down channel; ExitSignal reuses DownReason and carries no panic payload (joiner-only, as with monitors). spawn_link deferred to #5.
• Tests (tests/link.rs): linked pair one panics → other stopped (+Drop ran); trap_exit → other gets a message and survives; normal exit doesn't propagate; dead-pid link stops a non-trapper / messages a trapper; unlink prevents propagation.

4. Selective receive (independent track) ✅ DONE (03f3875)

Shipped. What landed vs the plan:

• Receiver::recv_match(pred) -> Result<T, RecvError> scans the queued VecDeque front-to-back, removes+returns the first match, leaves the rest in arrival order; parks and re-scans when nothing matches. try_recv_match (the non-blocking variant, mirroring try_recv) rolled in same commit.

• Wakeup turned out cheaper than feared: Sender::send already took parked_receiver on every push, so "wake on ANY send" needed no send-side change. The one real edit was relaxing Sender::drop to unpark the parked receiver on the last-sender drop regardless of queue emptiness — a selective receiver can park on a non-empty no-match queue and must wake to observe closure. No-op for plain recv (only ever parks on an empty queue); stress suite stays green.

• pred is Fn(&T) -> bool (not FnMut) on purpose: it's re-run from scratch on every scan, so a stateful predicate would re-count surprisingly. It runs under the channel lock — keep it cheap/pure, don't re-enter the channel.

• Close semantics: recv_match returns Err(RecvError) only when closed AND no queued message matches; a match is still returned on a closed channel. Non-matches are left for a later recv.

• Tests (tests/selective_recv.rs): out-of-order match pulled first; non-matches remain in order; park-on-non-empty then wake on a match; closed-with-only- non-matches → Err; closed-but-match-present → match; try_recv_match states.

  Original plan, for reference:

• Add Receiver::recv_match(pred) -> T: scan the queued VecDeque, remove+return first match, leave the rest in order; park and re-scan on new arrivals.

• This changes channel wakeup: a parked selective receiver must wake on ANY send (not just empty→nonempty) and re-scan. Touches channel.rs carefully — the stress tests guard lost-wakeup invariants; keep them green.

• Tests: messages arrive out of interest-order; match pulled first; non-matches remain for a later recv.

5. Grab-bag (each its own small commit)

• spawn_link: spawn-and-link atomically (deferred from #3); thin wrapper over spawn_under + link, but do it under one lock so there's no window where the child dies before the link is recorded.
• demonitor: needs a per-monitor id to remove a specific sender. Decide the monitor API NOW before more code depends on it — likely return a Monitor { id, rx } instead of a bare Receiver<Down>. ✅ DONE (this commit). What landed vs the plan:
  • monitor() now returns Monitor { id, target, rx } (added target over the sketched {id, rx} so demonitor jumps straight to the slot instead of scanning every slot for the id). MonitorId(u64) is opaque, from a monotonic next_monitor_id counter on SharedState, bumped under the shared lock in monitor() — no atomics, deterministic, never reused.
  • Slot.monitors: Vec<(MonitorId, Sender<Down>)>. The three slot-reset sites were untouched — they .clear()/Vec::new(), which is element-type- agnostic, so no new reset obligation. finalize_actor just destructures (_, m) and sends as before.
  • demonitor(&Monitor) -> Option<MonitorId>: Some(id) when a live registration was found+removed, None when it had already fired (drained on finalize), was NoProc, or the slot was reclaimed. Chose Option<MonitorId> over a bare bool — names which registration went. Generation half of the pid makes a stale demonitor a clean no-op: a recycled slot index fails slot_mut's generation check, so it can never strip a different actor's monitor.
  • ⚠️ Reentrancy: the removed Sender is removed out of the Vec under the lock but dropped after the lock is released — Sender::drop can unpark a parked receiver → with_shared, and the shared mutex is non-reentrant. Same discipline as finalize_actor.
  • "Flush" (discard a Down the target already queued) falls out of dropping the Monitor: demonitor(&m); drop(m). That's the cleanup the still-to-come gen_server call timeout wants — monitor the server, wait reply-or-Down- or-deadline, then demonitor+drop so a timed-out call leaks no registration and no stale Down.
  • Perf: touches Slot + finalize_actor, but chained_spawn/yield_many register no monitors, so the Vec stays empty (take-empty is identical cost, finalize loop runs zero times). before/after general probe medians within noise. Tests (tests/monitor.rs): demonitor-stops-delivery, one-of-many (siblings untouched), after-fire-is-None.
• Named registry: register(name,pid)/whereis/send_by_name; a HashMap<String,Pid> in SharedState.
• gen_server-style call/cast: request-reply correlation as a thin layer over channels (call sends {req, reply_tx}, awaits reply_rx); no runtime change. ✅ DONE (a4fcf6c). What landed vs the plan:
  • GenServer trait on the state value: assoc Call/Reply/Cast types, required handle_call/handle_cast, optional init/terminate hooks. ServerRef<G> is a clonable inbox sender + pid(); start / start_under.
  • One inbox, not two: a single Envelope { Call(req, reply_tx) | Cast } channel, dispatched by variant. Forced by no-select/no-unified-mailbox — a server can't wait on a call channel and a cast channel at once.
  • Server-down falls out of channel closure (no monitor needed): send fails if the inbox is gone; the reply sender drops on the server's unwind so a parked caller wakes to Err. Both → Call/CastError::ServerDown.
  • terminate runs via a drop guard → fires on every exit path (clean inbox close, handler panic, request_stop), not just the clean one. Caveat: it may run mid-unwind, so keep it non-blocking (a panic inside it during an unwind double-panics → abort).
  • No handle_info, no call timeout — both deferred to land with timeouts (handle_info needs the still-unmade cross-channel mailbox merge; a call timeout needs a per-recv deadline / Signal::Timeout).
  • Pure additive layer (no Slot/scheduler/spawn/finalize change) → no perf check run. Tests (tests/gen_server.rs): cast→call roundtrip, init/terminate ordering, both server-down paths.
• Docs: README now points at the experimental, untested aarch64 port on the arm-port branch. The module table still calls context x86-64-only — true for master, since the src/arch/ split rides on arm-port. Fold the arch/ split and ARM64-supported wording into the README module table + build section once arm-port is validated on hardware and merged.

Gotchas / invariants (respect these)

• Shared mutex is non-reentrant. Sender::send can call unpark → with_shared. NEVER send on a channel while holding the shared lock. Pattern: mem::take the senders/data under the lock, send after releasing. See finalize_actor (supervisor signal + monitor Downs both sent post-lock).
• finalize_actor order: take stack/waiters/monitors under lock + set Done/outcome → recycle stack (post-lock) → deliver supervisor Signal + monitor Downs (post-lock) → unpark joiners → reclaim slot iff outstanding_handles==0. Death notifications always precede reclamation, so a pid carried in a Signal/Down is still matchable even as its slot is about to be reused.
• Slot lifecycle is reset in THREE places — Slot::vacant(), reclaim_slot() (runtime.rs), and the slot-init block in spawn_under (scheduler.rs). Any new Slot field must be reset in all three (monitors was).
• Pid = (index, generation); stale handles caught by generation mismatch in slot()/slot_mut(). The monitor NoProc path relies on this.
• No select, no unified per-process mailbox. Why the supervisor uses the single supervisor_channel funnel rather than N monitor channels. trap_exit resolved this by giving each trapping actor a dedicated Receiver<ExitSignal> inbox (see #3); selective receive (#4) stayed per-channel (recv_match scans one channel's queue) rather than introducing a cross-channel mailbox — if selective receive ever needs to span the monitor/trap inboxes too, that cross-channel merge is the still-unmade decision.
• Cooperative-only: preemption and (future) cancellation both depend on the actor reaching check!()/yield/alloc/blocking points.
• run() is single-thread (Config::exact(1)); tests rely on deterministic single-thread ordering (parent runs until it parks). Multi-thread via runtime::init(Config…).

Workflow expectations (from the human)

• TDD: write the failing test first, then implement.
• Commit incrementally with conventional-commit messages; keep each commit a reviewable unit (they diff in their IDE and are the filter to the codebase).
• Run the full suite before each commit; check perf when a change touches Slot/scheduler/spawn/finalize hot paths.