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

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 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 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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