[Haskell-cafe] How does the RTS pin ByteArray# objects during FFI calls?

[Reiner Pope]

I see, so you're saying that there is no pinning of ByteArray# objects
during FFI calls, and the only property that guarantees correctness of
these FFI calls is that no GC happens during the FFI call. Furthermore,
that guarantee is only available for FFI calls tagged 'unsafe'. Good to
know!

The bug you linked <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8281> you
linked is scary in how much code is buggy in this regard. Thanks for the
heads-up!

Reiner

On Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 7:31 PM winter <drkoster at qq.com> wrote:

> You’d better use `UnliftedFFITypes` with unsafe FFI calls, since unsafe
> FFI calls act like fat prim-ops.
>
> GC can happen during safe FFI calls, safe FFI calls are running on other
> OS threads rather than GHC scheduling threads.
>
> Note: older version of GHCi used to implemented unsafe FFI using safe FFI,
> there’s an issue about this here:
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8281
>
>
> On 3 Jan 2018, at 10:51 AM, Reiner Pope <reiner.pope at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Haskell-Cafe,
>
> I understand from
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2014-June/114763.html that
> it is safe to pass ByteArray# objects to FFI calls, using the
> UnliftedFFITypes language extension. As I understand it, the implicit
> guarantee is that the RTS will pin the ByteArray#'s address in memory for
> the duration of the FFI call -- even if the ByteArray# wasn't allocated
> pinned.
>
> I'm curious: how does the RTS achieve this "retroactive" pinning? The
> documentation at
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Rts/Storage/GC/Pinned suggests
> that *all* ByteArrays are allocated pinned to account for the possibility
> that they will in future be passed to the FFI. Is this really the case?
> This seems like it forces an unreasonably slow allocator on small (say,
> ~10-byte) ByteArray allocations where the GC's usual bump-pointer allocator
> might otherwise be preferable.
>
> Regards,
> Reiner
>
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