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Erlang Run-Time System Application (ERTS)
Release Notes
Version 5.7.4

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• ERTS Release Notes
  • Top of chapter
  • Erts 5.7.4
  • Erts 5.7.3
  • Erts 5.7.2
  • Erts 5.7.1
  • Erts 5.7
  • Erts 5.6.5.1
  • Erts 5.6.5
  • Erts 5.6.4.2
  • Erts 5.6.4.1
  • Erts 5.6.4
  • Erts 5.6.3.3
  • Erts 5.6.3.2
  • Erts 5.6.3.1
  • Erts 5.6.3
  • Erts 5.6.2
  • Erts 5.6.1.1
  • Erts 5.6.1
  • Erts 5.6
  • Erts 5.5.5.5
  • Erts 5.5.5.4
  • Erts 5.5.5.3
  • Erts 5.5.5.2
  • Erts 5.5.5.1
  • Erts 5.5.5
  • Erts 5.5.4.3
  • Erts 5.5.4.2
  • Erts 5.5.4.1
  • Erts 5.5.4
  • Erts 5.5.3.1
  • Erts 5.5.3
  • Erts 5.5.2.2
  • Erts 5.5.2.1
  • Erts 5.5.2
  • Erts 5.5.1.1
  • Erts 5.5.1
  • ERTS 5.5
  • ERTS 5.4.13
  • ERTS 5.4.12
  • ERTS 5.4.11
  • ERTS 5.4.10
  • ERTS 5.4.9.2
  • ERTS 5.4.9.1
  • ERTS 5.4.9
  • ERTS 5.4.8
  • ERTS 5.4.7
  • ERTS 5.4.6
  • ERTS 5.4.5
  • ERTS 5.4.4
  • ERTS 5.4.3
  • ERTS 5.4.2.1
  • ERTS 5.4.2
  • ERTS 5.4.1

1 ERTS Release Notes

This document describes the changes made to the ERTS application.

1.1  Erts 5.7.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• An insufficient stack allocation was made when reading CPU information on BSD operating systems. (Thanks Michael Turner and Akira Kitada)

  Own Id: OTP-8207

• A bug when supplying an argument without a dash directly after the program name when starting erlang could prevent distribution to start. This is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-8209

• A ticker process could potentially be blocked indefinitely trying to send a tick to a node not responding. If this happened, the connection would not be brought down as it should.

  Own Id: OTP-8218

• Using certain firewalls (i.e. MS IAS Client and certain versions of COMODO) could expose an undocumented behaviour in the Win32 socket interface causing the name resolution calls to hang infinitely. This is now worked around by adding possibilities for port programs under Windows to use overlapped I/O on their standard input/output file handles.

  Own Id: OTP-8230

• Fixed bug on ETS tables with write_concurrency. The emulator could crash when doing a select or match with a bound key without finding any object.

  Own Id: OTP-8242

• The information-request / information-response, and group-leader-change-request / group-leader-changed-response signal pairs described below did not always adhere to the signal order guarantees of Erlang's signal model in the runtime system with SMP support. These signals could for example sometimes pass exit signals.

  The following BIFs behaviors can be modeled as if an asynchronous information-request signal is sent to Pid. If Pid is alive, it responds with an asynchronous information-response signal; otherwise, the runtime system responds with a no-such-process signal. When the response is received, the caller transforms it into the result of the BIF.

  • is_process_alive(Pid)
  • erlang:process_display(Pid, Type)
  • process_info(Pid)
  • process_info(Pid, ItemSpec)

  When Pid resides on the same node as the caller of group_leader(GroupLeader, Pid), the group_leader/2 BIFs behavior can be modeled as if an asynchronous group-leader-change-request signal is sent to Pid. If Pid is alive, it responds with an asynchronous group-leader-changed-response signal; otherwise, the runtime system responds with a no-such-process signal. When the response is received, the caller transforms it into the result of the BIF. The distributed case which only consists of an asynchronous group-leader-change-request signal and no response is not effected.

  Own Id: OTP-8245

• Errors in the system_profile documentation has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-8257

• Low watermark socket option modified high watermark instead of low watermark in the inet_driver. (Thanks to Feng Yu and Tuncer Ayaz)

  Own Id: OTP-8279

• A race condition could cause the runtime system with SMP support to end up in a completely unresponsive state.

  Own Id: OTP-8297

Improvements and New Features

• The use of pthread_cond_timedwait() have been completely removed from the runtime system. This since its behavior is unpredictable when the system clock is suddenly changed. The previous use of it was harmless.

  Own Id: OTP-8193

• The documentation is now built with open source tools (xsltproc and fop) that exists on most platforms. One visible change is that the frames are removed.

  Own Id: OTP-8201

• A new garbage collecting strategy for binaries which is more aggressive than the previous implementation. Binaries now has a virtual binary heap tied to each process. When binaries are created or received to a process it will check if the heap limit has been reached and if a reclaim should be done. This imitates the behavior of ordinary Erlang terms. The virtual heaps are grown and shrunk like ordinary heaps. This will lessen the memory footprint of binaries in a system.

  Own Id: OTP-8202

• The ErlDrvTermData term types used by driver_output_term() and driver_send_term() have been extended with the term types ERL_DRV_INT64, and ERL_DRV_UINT64 for passing 64-bit integers. Also the 64-bit integer data types ErlDrvSInt64 and ErlDrvUInt64 have been introduced.

  For more information see the erl_driver(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-8205

• [escript] The restriction that the first line in escripts must begin with #! has been removed.

  [escript] Some command line options to the escript executable has now been documented. For example you can run an escript in the debugger by just adding a command line option.

  [escript] The documentation of the escript header syntax has been clarified. For example the header is optional. This means that it is possible to directly "execute" .erl, .beam and.zip files.

  Own Id: OTP-8215

• The instruction for building OTP on Windows was outdated and incomplete, the document is updated.

  Also the otp_build script required windows drives to show up in Cygwin using the /cygdrive prefix. That requirement is now removed.

  Own Id: OTP-8219

• A module can have native implemented functions (NIFs) that are dynamically loaded by calling erlang:load_nif/2. This is an experimental feature that is not yet intended for production systems. It is released with intention to get some early feedback on the interfaces before they are carved in stone.

  Own Id: OTP-8220

• The float/1 BIF would always force a garbage collection. The BIFs size/1, byte_size/1, bit_size/1, abs/1, and round/1 would force a garbage-collection if the result was not a sufficiently small integer.

  Own Id: OTP-8221

• The erlang:port_command/3 BIF has been added. erlang:port_command/3 is currently not auto imported, but it is planned to be auto imported in OTP R14. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-8225

• 'configure --enable-darwin-64bit' would fail if Snow Leopard had been booted with the 64-bit kernel. (Thanks to Ryan M. Graham.)

  Own Id: OTP-8236

1.2  Erts 5.7.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• On Windows, open_port({spawn,Command},Opts) could not run executables with spaces in the path or filename, regardless of quoting efforts. While open_port({spawn_executable,Exec},Opts) can run any executable, it was still impossible to use 'spawn' to do the same thing. This is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-8055

• The scheduler bind type processor_spread spread schedulers too much on large NUMA systems.

  The new scheduler bind type spread spreads schedulers as much as possible, and behaves as processor_spread previously did. For more information see the documentation of the +sbt command line argument in the erl(1) documentation, and the documentation of erlang:system_flag(scheduler_bind_type, SchedulerBindType).

  Own Id: OTP-8063

• Automatically detected CPU topology on Linux system could erroneously contain logical processors with -1 as identifiers. This happened when sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_CONF) returned a value larger than the amount of logical processors found.

  Own Id: OTP-8064

• When the minimal term [] (end of list) was sent as the complete message to a process on another node, and received there, it could not be decoded. This bug is now corrected. Fortunately [] is uncommon as the complete message in real applications but it is a serious bug anyway.

  Own Id: OTP-8092

• A bug when the floating point exception pointer was not initialized has been corrected. It manifested itself on CentOS 5.1 sometimes when a floating point value was sent to a remote node. Bug reported and patch suggested by David Reiss, confirmed by Mikael Pettersson.

  Some build problems on IRIX was also corrected. Problem reported by Patrick Baggett, patch by Mikael Pettersson.

  Own Id: OTP-8095

• A terminating process could erroneously unregister a name for another process. This could occur under the following conditions: The name of the terminating process was unregistered and then registered for another process simultaneously as the process that first had the name was terminating.

  Own Id: OTP-8099 Aux Id: seq11344

• Running erlc in a very deep directory (with a path length of more 256 or more characters) would cause the emulator to crash in a call to list_to_atom/1. (Thanks to Chris Newcombe.)

  Own Id: OTP-8124

• A deadlock of the runtime system could occur when unregistering the name of a port.

  Own Id: OTP-8145

• Makefile.in has been updated to use the LDFLAGS environment variable (if set). (Thanks to Davide Pesavento.)

  Own Id: OTP-8157

• The pthread rwlock implemention on Linux could cause starvation of writers. We, therefore, now use our own rwlock implementation on Linux.

  Own Id: OTP-8158

• Open source Erlang builds are updated to work well on Snow Leopard (MacOS X 10.6)

  Own Id: OTP-8168

• A call to erlang:system_info(schedulers_online) could end up in an infinite loop. This happened if the amount of schedulers was larger than one, the amount of schedulers online was one, and someone was blocking multi-scheduling.

  Own Id: OTP-8169

• An error in erlang:system_profile/2 could cause timestamped messages to arrive out of order in the SMP case. This has now been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-8171

• binary_to_atom/2 and binary_to_existing_atom/2 would leak memory if the binary contained unaligned data.

  Own Id: OTP-8192

• The async thread pool in the runtime system without SMP support used a memory allocator that was not thread safe for async jobs.

  Own Id: OTP-8194

Improvements and New Features

• Processor internal NUMA nodes are now supported in the ERTS internal CPU topology representation. For more information see the documentation of the +sct command line argument in the erl(1) documentation, and the documentation of erlang:system_info(cpu_topology).

  Own Id: OTP-8041

• Documentation for ets improved about concurrency.

  Own Id: OTP-8050

• Emulator flags in an escript were earlier inherited to emulators started from from the emulator running the escript. For example when an escript invoked os:cmd("erl"), the new emulator were given erroneous emulator flags. This bug has now been fixed

  Escript filenames may now contain dots.

  Own Id: OTP-8060

• Made some BIFs non-recursive (relational operators,hash and phash) to limit internal stack usage.

  Own Id: OTP-8065

• Fixed Windows specific bug in erl_prim_loader. Now it handles the root directory (e.g. c:/) better. This bug affected the directory listing in the debugger.

  Own Id: OTP-8080

• A TCP socket with option {packet,4} could crash the emulator if it received a packet header with a very large size value (>2Gb). The same bug caused erlang:decode_packet/3 to return faulty values. (Thanks to Georgos Seganos.)

  Own Id: OTP-8102

• The maximum size of the export table has been raised from 65536 to 524288 entries.

  Own Id: OTP-8104 Aux Id: seq11345

• The file module has now a read_line/1 function similar to the io:get_line/2, but with byte oriented semantics. The function file:read_line/1 works for raw files as well, but for good performance it is recommended to use it together with the 'read_ahead' option for raw file access.

  Own Id: OTP-8108

• Fixed bug causing emulator crash when reading a term in external format containing a corrupt list with a negative length.

  Own Id: OTP-8117

• New emulator flag +sss, to set stack size of scheduler threads.

  Own Id: OTP-8119

• The Windows utility Erlsrv, run in interactive mode now accepts options for registering internal service name and description field of Windows registry database.

  Own Id: OTP-8132

• erlang:demonitor(Mon, [flush]) has been optimized. Previously it always searched the message queue of the caller for a 'DOWN' message. Current implementation only search the message queue when necessary. It is quite common that the search is not necessary.

  A new option info has been added to erlang:demonitor/2. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-8143

• I/O tasks could unnecessarily be rescheduled. This was harmless, but not useful work.

  Own Id: OTP-8148

• Minor improvements of erlang:memory/[1,2].

  Own Id: OTP-8152

• New configuration option to enable use of shared zlib.

  Own Id: OTP-8155

• Fixed smp bug in ETS that could cause emulator crash when table with more than 1000 objects accessed by several processes, including calls to variants of select or match combined with concurrent object deletion.

  Own Id: OTP-8166 Aux Id: seq11392

• The code path interpretation is now more relaxed. The flag -code_path_choice now defaults to relaxed instead of strict. See the documentation of code and init for more info.

  Own Id: OTP-8170

• Load balancing of run queues and check for I/O are triggered more often than before in situations where processes are scheduled often but are doing very little work each time they execute.

  Own Id: OTP-8172

• Call tracing binary comprehensions would cause an emulator crash. (Thanks to Paul Mineiro.)

  Own Id: OTP-8179

• binary_to_term/1 would crash the emulator instead of generating a badarg exception when given certain invalid terms. (Thanks to Scott Lystig Fritchie.)

  Own Id: OTP-8180

1.3  Erts 5.7.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Crash dumps should now cause less problems for the crashdump_viewer application. (For processes where arity was non-zero, the arguments are now longer printed - they used to be printed in a format that was not parseable.)

  Own Id: OTP-7472 Aux Id: seq11019, 11292

• Processes could potentially get stuck on an offline scheduler.

  Own Id: OTP-7990

• binary_to_atom/2 and binary_to_existing_atom/2 could leak memory if they caused a badarg exception.

  Own Id: OTP-7997

• A process could under very rare circumstances erroneously be resumed.

  Own Id: OTP-8000

• Load balancing between schedulers could under rare circumstances cause an emulator crash.

  Own Id: OTP-8008

• erlang:memory(processes_used) always returned 0 instead of the correct value. (Thanks to Geoff Cant)

  Own Id: OTP-8022

Improvements and New Features

• Major improvements of the Erlang distribution for Erlang runtime systems with SMP support. Previously distribution port locks were heavily contended, and all encoding and decoding for a specific distribution channel had to be done in sequence. Lock contention due to the distribution is now negligible and both encoding and decoding of Erlang messages can be done in parallel.

  The old atom cache protocol used by the Erlang distribution has been dropped since it effectively prevented all parallel encoding and decoding of messages passed over the same distribution channel.

  A new atom cache protocol has been introduced which isolates atom cache accesses and makes parallel encoding and decoding of messages passed over the same distribution channel possible. The new atom cache protocol also use an atom cache size 8 times larger than before. The new atom cache protocol is documented in the ERTS users guide.

  Erlang messages received via the distribution are now decoded by the receiving Erlang processes without holding any distribution channel specific locks. Erlang messages and signals sent over the distribution are as before encoded by the sending Erlang process, but now without holding any distribution channel specific locks during the encoding. That is, both encoding and decoding can be and are done in parallel regardless of distribution channel used.

  The part that cannot be parallelized is the atom cache updates. Atom cache updates are therefore now scheduled on the distribution port. Since it is only one entity per distribution channel doing this work there is no lock contention due to the atom cache updates.

  The new runtime system does not understand the old atom cache protocol. New and old runtime systems can however still communicate, but no atom cache will be used.

  Own Id: OTP-7774

• Fixed a bug that caused error logging from driver_select sometimes with additional symptoms such as failing IP communications or even an emulator crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7898 Aux Id: seq11304

• Improved SMP concurrency for ETS tables. Several mutating operations can now be performed truly concurrent on different records of the same table. To support this, the table has to be created with option write_concurrency, as it is achieved at the expense of some execution and memory overhead. ets:select and select_count has also been improved for all tables to not acquire exclusive table lock during the iteration.

  Own Id: OTP-7922

• erl (that is erl.exe and dyn_erl) and erlexec has been made more dynamic so no hard coded paths needs to added at installation time to erl (that is erl.ini and erl). Reltool will make use of this in a future release.

  Own Id: OTP-7952

• Added functionality to get higher resolution timestamp from system. The erlang:now function returns a timestamp that's not always consistent with the actual operating system time (due to resilience against large time changes in the operating system). The function os:timestamp/0 is added to get a similar timestamp as the one being returned by erlang:now, but untouched by Erlangs time correcting and smoothing algorithms. The timestamp returned by os:timestamp is always consistent with the operating systems view of time, like the calendar functions for getting wall clock time, but with higher resolution. Example of usage can be found in the os manual page.

  Own Id: OTP-7971

• Two new options are added to open_port - spawn_executable which runs external executables in a controlled way, and spawn_driver which only opens port to loaded Erlang drivers. See the erlang manual page for details.

  Own Id: OTP-7995

• New functionality in ETS to transfer the ownership of a table. A table can either change owner be declaring an "heir", another process that will inherit the table if the owner terminates. A table can also change owner by calling a new function ets:give_away.

  Own Id: OTP-8006

• Updates to Tilera build environment.

  Own Id: OTP-8009

• A stack trace was unnecessarily saved during process termination.

  Own Id: OTP-8014

• User defined CPU topology and scheduler bind type can now be set from the command line when starting an emulator. For more information see the documentation of the +sct, and the +sbt emulator flags in the erl(1) documentation.

  The CPU topologies returned from erlang:system_info/1 and erlang:system_flag/2 now always contain the processor level, also when not strictly necessary.

  Own Id: OTP-8030

• Various fixes in ETS: ets:first could return a deleted key in a fixated table. ets:lookup could return objects out of order if a deleted object was re-inserted into a fixed bag. ets:delete_object could fail to delete duplicate objects in a duplicate_bag.

  Own Id: OTP-8040

1.4  Erts 5.7.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Fixed a bug on Windows that could make gen_tcp:send hang trying to send an iolist of more than 16 binaries.

  Own Id: OTP-7816

• The runtime system could under rare circumstances crash during load balancing.

  Own Id: OTP-7908 Aux Id: otp-7500

• run_erl uses fallback if Unix98 pseudo-terminal is not present on host.

  Own Id: OTP-7916 Aux Id: seq11249

• A message buffer memory leak in the runtime system without smp support has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-7941

• Attempting to append a binary of 16Mb or greater to another binary using the bit syntax would cause a system_limit exception. There was also several cases when constructing binaries when a badarg exception was generated when it should have been system_limit.

  Own Id: OTP-7942

• The runtime system with SMP support failed to terminate the caller of link(RemotePid) properly, if RemotePid was the pid of a process on an unreachable node. The calling process was in this case marked as exiting, but never terminated.

  Own Id: OTP-7946

Improvements and New Features

• Rudimentary support for cross compiling is added to the source release. The support is still in its infancy and has only been used to cross compile on Linux for a different cpu architecture and a different Linux version, but should be extendible to support other platforms as well. The cross configuration files with examples are placed in $ERL_TOP/xcomp/. View README.xcomp and run $ERL_TOP/otp_build -help for further information.

  Own Id: OTP-7854

• The escape sequence \{ which was given a new interpretation in R13A has retained its old meaning (the ASCII code for {), which means that codes greater than 255 have to be stated using hexadecimal characters (for example, \x{AAA}). The escape sequence \xH where H is a hexadecimal character followed by something else but a hexadecimal character is no longer valid (incompatibility with R13A). Character codes less than 256 can be stated using two hexadecimal characters (for example, \x0D).

  Own Id: OTP-7891 Aux Id: OTP-7855

• The term_to_binary/1 BIF used to be implemented with recursive C code, which could cause the Erlang emulator to terminate because of a stack overflow.

  Also fixed some minor issues in term_to_binary/1 and binary_to_term/1 pointed out by Matthew Dempsky.

  Own Id: OTP-7894

• Several glitches and performance issues in the Unicode and I/O-system implementation of R13A have been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7896 Aux Id: OTP-7648 OTP-7887

• Minor documentation improvements of the scheduler_bind_type argument of erlang:system_flag/2, and the scheduler_bind_type, and the scheduler_bindings arguments of erlang:system_info/1.

  Own Id: OTP-7901 Aux Id: OTP-7777

• There is a new BIF erlang:make_tuple/3.

  Own Id: OTP-7913

1.5  Erts 5.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• OpenSource:

  FreeBSD leap-seconds are handled according to patch submitted by OpenSource user Kenji Rikitake. No test case covers this functionality (unsupported platform).

  Own Id: OTP-7609

• A corrected bug in ets for bag and duplicate_bag. A delete/2 or lookup_element/3 could miss objects in a fixed table if one or more objects with the same key had already been deleted.

  Own Id: OTP-7665

• A new driver call-back stop_select is introduced to allow drivers to de-select and then close a file descriptor in a safe way in a SMP emulator. The old way was not strictly according to posix standard and could in some rare cases lead to unexpected behavior. A new flag ERL_DRV_USE can be passed to driver_select() to tell it that the descriptor should be closed. stop_select is then called when it is safe to do so. Old drivers will however still work as before.

  Own Id: OTP-7670

• A bug fixed for TCP sockets with option {packet,http}. An HTTP request with an absolute URI was returned with a corrupt path string. This bug did only exist in R12B-4 and R12B-5.

  Own Id: OTP-7682 Aux Id: OTP-7647

• run_erl did in some cases fail to extract control sequences from to_erl (like: winsize=X,Y) and did instead send them to be interpreted by the erlang shell.

  Own Id: OTP-7688

• A bug in the installer on Windows not updating file associations properly is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7746

• More space than necessary could be allocated in binaries when appending to a binary (also in a binary comprehension) and the data appended did not consist of wholes bytes (e.g. 13 bits).

  Own Id: OTP-7747

• The gen_sctp option sctp_peer_addr_params, #sctp_paddrparams{address={IP,Port} was erroneously decoded in the inet driver. This bug has now been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7755

• Outstanding async driver jobs leaked memory if the issuing port died before the async jobs completed.

  Own Id: OTP-7784

• A bug in the dynamic library loading affecting, among others, OpenSolaris is now corrected. (Thanks to Paul Fisher.)

  Own Id: OTP-7796

• run_erl compile errors fixed for FreeBSD

  Own Id: OTP-7817

• A bug in the inet driver for SCTP on Solaris showing for e.g gen_sctp:abort/1 and gen_sctp:eof/1 has been corrected. Patch suggestion by Simon Cornish.

  Own Id: OTP-7866

Improvements and New Features

• The order of objects visited in select for ordered_set is now documented.

  Own Id: OTP-7339

• The runtime system with SMP support now uses multiple, scheduler specific run queues, instead of one globally shared run queue.

  The lock protecting the shared run queue was heavily contended, and the shared run queue also caused Erlang processes to randomly migrate between schedulers with negative cache effects as a result.

  With the current scheduler specific run queue solution, lock contention due to run queue protection has been reduced, and Erlang processes are only migrated when needed to balance the load between the schedulers. The reduced amount of migration also reduce lock contention on locks protecting the scheduler specific instances of the erts internal memory allocators.

  The scheduler specific run queues are also a necessity for a lot of future planned NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) specific optimizations.

  Own Id: OTP-7500

• Support for Unicode is implemented as described in EEP10. Formatting and reading of unicode data both from terminals and files is supported by the io and io_lib modules. Files can be opened in modes with automatic translation to and from different unicode formats. The module 'unicode' contains functions for conversion between external and internal unicode formats and the re module has support for unicode data. There is also language syntax for specifying string and character data beyond the ISO-latin-1 range.

  The interactive shell will support input and output of unicode characters when the terminal and operating system supports it.

  Please see the EEP and the io/io_lib manual pages as well as the stdlib users guide for details.

  I/O-protocol incompatibilities:

  The io_protocol between io_Server and client is updated to handle protocol data in unicode formats. The updated protocol is now documented. The specification resides in the stdlib users manual, which is a new part of the manual.

  io module incompatibilities:

  The io:put_chars, io:get_chars and io:get_line all handle and return unicode data. In the case where binaries can be provided (as to io:put_chars), they shall be encoded in UTF-8. When binaries are returned (as by io:get_line/get_chars when the io_server is set in binary mode) the returned data is also always encoded as UTF-8. The file module however still returns byte-oriented data, why file:read can be used instead of io:get_chars to read binary data in ISO-latin-1.

  io_lib module incompatibilities:

  io_lib:format can, given new format directives (i.e "~ts" and "~tc"), return lists containing integers larger than 255.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7648 Aux Id: OTP-7580 OTP-7514 OTP-7494 OTP-7443 OTP-7181 EEP10 EEP11

• The format of the string returned by erlang:system_info(system_version) (as well as the first message when Erlang is started) has changed. The string now contains the both the OTP version number as well as the erts version number.

  Own Id: OTP-7649

• Message passing has been further optimized for parallel execution. Serial message passing is slightly more expensive than before, but parallel send to a common receiver is much cheaper.

  Own Id: OTP-7659

• Lock contention on the atom table lock when decoding Erlang terms on the external format has been drastically reduced.

  Own Id: OTP-7660

• The undocumented, unsupported, and deprecated guard BIF is_constant/1 has been removed.

  *** INCOMPATIBILITY with R12B ***

  Own Id: OTP-7673

• The Erlang process lock implementation has been improved by Mat Hostetter at Tilera Corporation.

  Own Id: OTP-7692

• A {nodedown, Node} message passed by the net_kernel:monitor_nodes/X functionality is now guaranteed to be sent after Node has been removed from the result returned by erlang:nodes/Y.

  Own Id: OTP-7725

• The short-circuit operators andalso and orelse no longer guarantees that their second argument is either true or false. As a consequence, andalso/orelse are now tail-recursive.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7748

• A new BIF, lists:keyfind/3, has been added. It works like lists:keysearch/3 except that it does not wrap the returned tuple in a value tuple in case of success. (Thanks to James Hague for suggesting this function.)

  Own Id: OTP-7752

• Optimization for drivers by creating small binaries direct on process heap.

  Own Id: OTP-7762

• I bsl N could cause the Erlang virtual machine to run of memory instead generating a system_limit if N was absurdly huge. (Thanks to Daniel Hedlund.)

  There would always be a garbage collection when evaluating I bsl N or I bsr N if I was a bignum.

  If I is an integer and N a bignum, I bsl N will now cause the correct system_limit exception instead of bad_arith as in earlier releases.

  If I is an integer and N a bignum, I bsr N will return either 0 or -1 depending on the sign of I instead of causing a bad_arith exception as in earlier releases.

  Own Id: OTP-7764

• Scheduler threads can now be bound to logical processors on newer Linux and Solaris systems. More systems will be supported in the future.

  In some cases performance has increased drastically when binding schedulers. Schedulers are not bound by default, though. This since it might cause a performance degradation if multiple programs have bound to processors, e.g. multiple Erlang runtime systems. For more information see the documentation of erlang:system_flag/2.

  In order to bind scheduler threads the CPU topology need to be known. On some newer Linux and Solaris systems the runtime system automatically detects the CPU topology. If the emulator isn't able to automatically detect the CPU topology, the CPU topology can be defined. For more information see the documentation of erlang:system_flag/2.

  Own Id: OTP-7777

• The compiler will refuse to a compile file where the module name in the file differs from the output file name.

  When compiling using erlc, the current working directory will no be included in the code path (unless explicitly added using "-pa .").

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7793

• The BIFs atom_to_binary/2, binary_to_atom/2, and binary_to_existing_atom/2 have been added.

  Own Id: OTP-7804

• The amount of schedulers online can now be changed during operation. The amount of schedulers online defaults to the same amount as available logical processors. For more information see the documentation of erlang:system_flag/2 and erl.

  Own Id: OTP-7811

• The deprecated functions erlang:fault/1, erlang:fault/2, and file:rawopen/2 have been removed.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7812

• Erts internal dynamically allocated process and port specific data for rarely used data. This is used to reduce memory usage of processes and ports that do not use specific functionality. More functionality will be moved to process and port specific data in future releases.

  Own Id: OTP-7818

• New packet type http_bin for gen_tcp sockets and erlang:decode_packet. It works like http except that strings are returned as binaries instead of lists.

  Own Id: OTP-7821

• The obsolete wd_keeper program for embedded Solaris systems has been removed.

  Own Id: OTP-7822

• Nodes belonging to different independent clusters can now co-exist on the same host with the help of a new environment variable setting ERL_EPMD_PORT.

  Own Id: OTP-7826

• There are new functions erlang:min/2 and erlang:max/2 to calculate the minimum and maximum of two terms, respectively. Note that the functions are not auto-imported, so they need to be imported explicitly or the erlang prefix must be used when calling them.

  Own Id: OTP-7841

• The copyright notices have been updated.

  Own Id: OTP-7851

• Enhanced build environment for cross compilation to Tilera Tile architecture.

  Support for native ethread atomics on Tilera Tile64/TilePro (Thanks to Tilera Corporation).

  Own Id: OTP-7852

• The escape sequences \x and \{ have been assigned new interpretations (they used to return the ASCII code for x and { respectively). One or more octal characters inside curly brackets after a leading backslash is from now on an alternative to the existing syntax \NNN, but can also be used for codes greater than 255. In a similar fashion, one or more hexadecimal characters can be put inside curly brackets after a leading \x. Furthermore, the escape sequences \xH and \xHH, where N is a hexadecimal character, can be used for codes less than 256.

  NOTE: These new escape sequences are still considered experimental and may be changed in the R13B release.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7855

• The PCRE library's exported function names are now prefixed with erts_ in the erlang emulator to avoid clashes with dynamically loaded drivers.

  Own Id: OTP-7861

• A runtime system with SMP support will now be built by default on most platforms if a usable posix thread library or native windows threads are found.

  For more information see the top README file.

  Own Id: OTP-7872

1.6  Erts 5.6.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• A corrected bug in ets for bag and duplicate_bag. A delete/2 or lookup_element/3 could miss objects in a fixed table if one or more objects with the same key had already been deleted.

  Own Id: OTP-7665

• A bug fixed for TCP sockets with option {packet,http}. An HTTP request with an absolute URI was returned with a corrupt path string. This bug did only exist in R12B-4 and R12B-5.

  Own Id: OTP-7682 Aux Id: OTP-7647

• Calling gen_tcp:send() from several processes on socket with option send_timeout could lead to much longer timeout than specified. The solution is a new socket option {send_timeout_close,true} that will do automatic close on timeout. Subsequent calls to send will then immediately fail due to the closed connection.

  Own Id: OTP-7731 Aux Id: seq11161

• A process being garbage collected via the garbage_collect/1 BIF or the check_process_code/2 BIF didn't handle message receive and resume correctly during the garbage collect. When this occurred, the process returned to the state it had before the garbage collect instead of entering the new state.

  Own Id: OTP-7738

1.7  Erts 5.6.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• A bug in inet_drv concerning gen_tcp:connect has been corrected. A connect towards a non-open port through open firewalls could sometimes erroneously be successful. Any subsequent operation would fail, though.

  Own Id: OTP-6542

• Floating point arithmetics in drivers could cause a runtime system crash and/or unexpected results on runtime systems with floating point exceptions enabled. Floating point exceptions are disabled unless explicitly enabled or if hipe is enabled.

  Own Id: OTP-7237

• A bug when many sockets got signalled simultaneously causing the emulator to panic with the message "Inconsistent, why isnt io reported?" is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7420

• Starting erl with option "-detached" now disconnects correctly from terminal session on Unix.

  Own Id: OTP-7461

• Mended gdb etp-commands for ETS access.

  Own Id: OTP-7538

• erlang:decode_packet/3 allows white space between HTTP header tag and colon according to RFC2616.

  Own Id: OTP-7543

• An emulator compiled for SCTP now starts even if the dynamic libraries are not present. The SCTP driver is then of course not loaded.

  Own Id: OTP-7551

• To build on Mac OS X, 10.3.0 or later is now required because of fixes for two problems:

  There would be a resource leak when erl_ddl attempted to unload a driver. This problem has been corrected by using dlopen() (which works on all modern Unix-like platforms) instead of the Mac OS X specific API calls.

  Signal handling in the run-time system for HiPE has been updated to work on later versions of Mac OS X than 10.2.x. Therefore, --enable-hipe now works on Mac OS X with Intel CPUs.

  Thanks to Geoff Cant for the patches.

  Own Id: OTP-7562

• Corrected some information about the protocol between EPMD and Erlang nodes. (Thanks to Michael Regen.)

  Own Id: OTP-7594

• When using erlang:system_monitor(Pid,{long_gc,Time}), and the GC time exceeded 1 second, it sometimes erroneously showed up as about 4300 seconds. (This bug was corrected in R9C, but re-introduced in R12B.) (Thanks to Chris Newcombe.)

  Own Id: OTP-7622 Aux Id: OTP-4903, seq8379

Improvements and New Features

• The driver entry of a dynamically loaded driver is now copied when loaded which enables some internal optimizations. Note that drivers that modify the driver entry during execution will not work anymore. Such a miss-use of the driver interface is however not supported.

  Own Id: OTP-6900

• The split function is now added to the re library. Exceptions and errors from both run, replace and split are made more consistent.

  Own Id: OTP-7514 Aux Id: OTP-7494

• Fixed harmless compiler warnings when building the emulator and minor build changes in order to avoid unnecessary rebuilds.

  Own Id: OTP-7530

• There is now experimental support for loading of code from archive files. See the documentation of code, init, erl_prim_loader and escript for more info.

  The error handling of escripts has been improved.

  An escript may now set explicit arguments to the emulator, such as -smp enabled.

  An escript may now contain a precompiled beam file.

  An escript may now contain an archive file containing one or more applications (experimental).

  The internal module code_aux has been removed.

  Own Id: OTP-7548 Aux Id: otp-6622

• The reallocation functionality part of the ERTS internal memory allocators, now consider current block in combination with surrounding free blocks as an alternative location for a reallocation.

  Own Id: OTP-7555

• There could remain false references from a process to a module that has been called earlier, so that the process would be killed if the module was reloaded. (Thanks to Richard Carlsson.)

  Also, the fix for this bug also made it possible to make stack backtraces (as returned from erlang:get_stacktrace/0 and other functions) more correct in that the immediate caller is always included in the stack backtrace (it could sometimes be missing).

  Own Id: OTP-7559

• Improved locking in IO-handling for better smp performance.

  Own Id: OTP-7560

• Improved BIF rescheduling functionality.

  Own Id: OTP-7587

• Loading a module compiled with Erlang/OTP R9C and calling module_info/0 in the module would crash the emulator. The emulator now refuses to load any module compiled with R9C or earlier. (Note: only trivial modules compiled with R10B or earlier could be loaded anyway.) (Thanks to Martin Kjellin.)

  Own Id: OTP-7590

1.8  Erts 5.6.4.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• A process calling one of the following BIFs could under very rare conditions deadlock in the runtime system with SMP support: check_process_code/2, garbage_collect/1, process_info/[1,2], system_flag/2, and erlang:suspend_process/[1,2].

  Own Id: OTP-7582

• A couple of statistics variables were not managed in a thread safe manner in the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-7583

• An extremely rare race condition when terminating a process could potentially cause a runtime system crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7584

• Under certain conditions and when using run_erl/to_erl, the terminal Erlang driver (ttsl_drv) could crash the emulator by doing a division by zero due to incorrect handling of terminals reporting a zero width. For terminals reporting zero width, the driver now fallbacks to a default width of 80 and a default height of 24 (vt100), as a fallback behaviour. This fixes the crashes and also makes output on "dumb" terminals much more readable.

  Own Id: OTP-7592 Aux Id: seq11073

1.9  Erts 5.6.4.1

Improvements and New Features

• A new erts_alloc parameter +M<S>rmbcmt (relative multiblock carrier move threshold) has been added. It determines when to force a moving realloc in a multiblock carrier when a block is shrunk. For more information see the erts_alloc(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-7540

• The new option +d can be given to erl to suppress the crash dump generation if an internal error is detected. As a result, a more useful core dump is produced.

  Own Id: OTP-7578 Aux Id: seq11052

1.10  Erts 5.6.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Double backslashes in format string passed to the erts internal printf implementation produced erroneous results. No such format strings were passed to the erts internal printf implementation, i.e., the bug was therefore completely harmless. (Thanks to Perry Smith.)

  Own Id: OTP-7408

• Large files are now handled on Windows, where the filesystem supports it.

  Own Id: OTP-7410

• Bug fixed for {packet,http} when space follows http headers.

  Own Id: OTP-7458

• The trace option running could cause an emulator crash if the current function couldn't be determined.

  Own Id: OTP-7484

• Using 16#ffffFFFF as a timeout value in receive...after would often cause a timeout almost at once due to an 32-bit integer overflow. (Thanks to Serge Aleynikov and Matthias Lang.)

  Own Id: OTP-7493

• For the process that an escript runs in, the trap_exit process flag is now false instead of true (as in previous releases). Scripts that depend on the previous (counter-intuitive) behaviour might not work. (Thanks to Bengt Kleberg.)

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7517

• A bug in the string:to_integer/1 builtin made the emulator unstable. This is now corrected. (Thanks to Lev Walkin.)

  Own Id: OTP-7526

Improvements and New Features

• Performance for ETS intensive applications should now be better in the SMP emulator. Also, ETS table identifiers (as returned by ets:new/2) are now spread out in wider range than before (using 28 bits in a 32-bit emulator) to make sure that the table identifier for a deleted table will not be quickly re-used.

  NOTE: Table identifiers can now be negative integers. Programs that (incorrectly) assume that table identifiers can only be positive integers might stop to work. (The type of a table identifier is intentionally not documented, and may change in a future release.)

  Own Id: OTP-7348

• New BIF erlang:decode_packet/3 that extracts a protocol packet from a binary. Similar to the socket option {packet, Type}. Also documented the socket packet type http and made it official. NOTE: The tuple format for http packets sent from an active socket has been changed in an incompatible way.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7404

• The source code for the documentation for some applications (erts, kernel, stdlib, and several others) are now included in the source tar ball. There is currently no Makefile support for building HTML files from the source (such support will be included in a future release).

  Own Id: OTP-7406

• A lot of frequently accessed memory counters (erts internal) have been removed. This since they hurt performance on the runtime system with SMP support. As a result erlang:memory/[0,1] will only deliver a result if all erts_alloc(3) allocators are enabled (default). The result delivered when all erts_alloc(3) allocators are enabled are both more accurate and less accurate than before. More memory than before are included in the result, but the different parts that are summed are not gathered atomically. A call to erlang:memory/[0,1] is much cheaper for the system than before. This since the information isn't gathered atomically anymore which was very expensive.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7468

• Pre-allocators used for, for example, timers, and messages have been rewritten to be scheduler specific. That is, different schedulers will now allocate from different pools which reduces lock contention.

  Own Id: OTP-7470

• On Mac OS X, file:sync/1 now guarantees that all filesystem buffers are written to the disk by using the fcntl() with F_FULLFSYNC option. Previously, file:sync/1 called fsync(), which only guaranteed that the data had been transferred to the disk drive. (Thanks to Jan Lehnardt.)

  Own Id: OTP-7471

• Termination of a process that takes a long time can now be preempted, i.e., the terminating process will be rescheduled for later continuation of termination so that other processes can execute. Termination of a process that owns many and/or large ets tables typically takes a long time.

  Own Id: OTP-7477

• A new trace option exiting has been added. The exiting trace is similar to the running trace, but for exiting processes. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  The erlang:trace/3 bif now doesn't block other scheduler threads if only one tracee is specified in the call to erlang:trace/3.

  Own Id: OTP-7481

• The re module is extended with repetitive matches (global option) and replacement function.

  Own Id: OTP-7494 Aux Id: OTP-7181

• In the section about binary construction, the reference manual now mentions what happens when an integer value does not fit into an integer segment of size N (namely, that the N least significant bits will be put into into the binary and that the most significant bits will be silently discarded). (Thanks to Edwin Fine.)

  Own Id: OTP-7506

• Setting the {active,once} for a socket (using inets:setopts/2) is now specially optimized (because the {active,once} option is typically used much more frequently than other options).

  Own Id: OTP-7520

Known Bugs and Problems

• Floating point arithmetics in drivers can cause a runtime system crash and/or unexpected results on runtime systems with floating point exceptions enabled. Floating point exceptions are disabled unless explicitly enabled or if hipe is enabled.

  Own Id: OTP-7237

1.11  Erts 5.6.3.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Binary construction with an integer field of size 0 at the end of the constructed binary (and the size given in a variable), would cause a write of one byte outside the memory reserved for the binary, which in turn could cause an emulator crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7422

• A race condition in the dynamic driver implementation could cause an emulator crash. (Thanks to Paul Fisher)

  Own Id: OTP-7464

• Calls to erlang:system_info(allocated_areas) could cause the runtime system with SMP support to crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7474

• The env option to open_port() could cause the runtime system with SMP support to crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7475

Improvements and New Features

• Operations that needed to block other threads in the runtime system with SMP support unnecessarily waited for async threads to block. Most important the erlang:memory/[0,1] bif, code loading, and the erlang:trace/3 bif.

  Own Id: OTP-7480

1.12  Erts 5.6.3.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Calls to erlang:memory/[0,1] could cause the runtime system with SMP support to crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7415

1.13  Erts 5.6.3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Doing local call trace on bit syntax matching code that has been optimized with delayed sub-binary creation could crash the emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-7399 Aux Id: seq10978

1.14  Erts 5.6.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Only one to_erl process at a time is allowed to connect to the same run_erl pipe. Prevents buggy behaviour when IO from several to_erl's get interleaved.

  Own Id: OTP-5107

• IPv6 name resolving has now been fixed to use getaddrinfo() patch (thoroughly reworked) courtesy of Love Hörnquist-Åstrand submitted by Fredrik Thulin. It also can use gethostname2() patch (also reworked) courtesy of Mikael Magnusson for debian submitted by Sergei Golovan.

  Own Id: OTP-5382

• Improved error handling in run_erl

  Own Id: OTP-7252

• A permanent fix for the deadlock issue temporarily fixed by OTP-7260.

  OTP-7260

  The runtime system with SMP support could under rare circumstances deadlock when a distribution channel was taken down while multiple simultaneous operations were performed on it.

  Own Id: OTP-7267 Aux Id: OTP-7260

• ./configure has been improved to find 64-bit OpenSSL libraries.

  Own Id: OTP-7270

• A terminating process could under very rare circumstances trigger a bug which could crash the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-7272

• SCTP_ADDR_CONFIRMED events are now handled by gen_sctp.

  Own Id: OTP-7276

• binary_to_term/1 would crash the emulator if the binary data contained an external fun with non-atom module and/or function. Corrected to generate a badarg exception.

  Own Id: OTP-7281

• On Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), sending to socket which the other end closes could cause the emulator to consume 100% CPU time. (Thanks to Matthias Radestock.)

  Own Id: OTP-7289

• The vanilla driver used on Windows could crash the emulator and sometimes produced corrupt files. The vanilla driver is the driver that is used when one only pass a filename as first argument to open_port/2. NOTE: This use of open_port/2 is obsolete, and the documentation of this use has previously been removed. The functionality is only present for backward compatibility reasons and will eventually be removed.

  Own Id: OTP-7301

• Faulty matching in binaries larger than 512Mb on 64bit machines fixed.(On 32bit, the size limit for binaries is still 512Mb). Thanks to Edwin Fine and Per Gustafsson for finding fault and fix.

  Own Id: OTP-7309

• crypto:start() on Windows caused emulator to hang on error popup window if openssl DLL was not found. Windows error popups now suppressed.

  Own Id: OTP-7325

• Configuration option without-termcap can be used to disable the use of termcap libraries for terminal cursor control in the shell.

  Own Id: OTP-7338

• to_erl reports its terminal window size to run_erl in order to get output formatted accordingly

  Own Id: OTP-7342

• On Solaris, the compressed option for file operations did not work if the file descriptor happened to be greater than 255 (a problem with fopen() and friends in Solaris itself).

  Own Id: OTP-7343 Aux Id: seq10949

• A race condition in the runtime system with SMP support causing an erroneous removal of a newly created ets table has been fixed.

  The race occurred when a process removed a table during termination simultaneously as another process removed the same table via ets:delete/1 and a third process created a table that accidentaly got the same internal table index as the table being removed.

  Own Id: OTP-7349

• zlib:inflate failed when the size of the inflated data was an exact multiple of the internal buffer size (4000 bytes by default).

  Own Id: OTP-7359

• If the total number of allowed atoms is exceeded, there will now be a controlled termination of the emulator with a crash dump file. The emulator used to simply crash. (Thanks Howard Yeh and Thomas Lindgren.)

  Own Id: OTP-7372

• The break handler in werl on Windows could cause the emulator to hang or crash, that is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7394 Aux Id: seq10969

• The configure script now tests for an serious optimization bug in gcc-4.3.0. If the bug is present, the configure script will abort (if this happens, the only way to build Erlang/OTP is to change to another version of gcc). (Thanks to Mikael Pettersson.)

  Own Id: OTP-7397

Improvements and New Features

• On Unix, the emulator now notices when the width of the terminal has changed. (Thanks to Matthew Dempsky and Patrick Mahoney.)

  Own Id: OTP-7290

• There is a new function init:stop/1 which can be used to shutdown the system cleanly AND generate a non-zero exit status or crash dump. (Thanks to Magnus Froberg.)

  Own Id: OTP-7308

• process_info(Pid, garbage_collection) now returns more information

  Own Id: OTP-7311

• The hide option for open_port/2 is now documented. (Thanks to Richard Carlsson.)

  Own Id: OTP-7358

Known Bugs and Problems

• Floating point arithmetics in drivers can cause a runtime system crash on runtime systems with floating point exceptions enabled. Floating point exceptions are disabled unless explicitly enabled or if hipe is enabled.

  Own Id: OTP-7237

1.15  Erts 5.6.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The maximum length of an atom of 255 characters is now strictly enforced. binary_to_term/1 will now fail with a badarg if an encoded term contains an atom longer than 255 characters. Atoms created by drivers will now be truncated to 255 characters if necessary. (Thanks to Matthew Dempsky.)

  Own Id: OTP-7147

• A bug in "bignum handling" on some 64bit architectures could cause rem and div operations on large numbers to hang indefinitely. Rem operations involving the smallest negative number representable in 28 bits or 60 bits could also cause access violation and emulator crash. Both errors are corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7177

• When doing the initial garbage collection after waking a hibernated process, a fullsweep garbage collection was unnecessarily triggered.

  Own Id: OTP-7212

• The beta testing module gen_sctp now supports active mode as stated in the documentation. Active mode is still rather untested, and there are some issues about what should be the right semantics for gen_sctp:connect/5. In particular: should it be blocking or non-blocking or choosable. There is a high probability it will change semantics in a (near) future patch.

  Try it, give comments and send in bug reports!

  Own Id: OTP-7225

• Invalid arguments to ets:update_counter/3 were not handled correctly. A tuple position (Pos) less than 1 caused the element directly following the key to be updated (as if no position at all had been specified). All invalid values for Pos will now fail with badarg.

  Own Id: OTP-7226

• The runtime system with SMP support could under rare circumstances deadlock when a distribution channel was taken down while multiple simultaneous operations were performed on it.

  Own Id: OTP-7260

Improvements and New Features

• More checksum/hash algorithms from the zlib library are now available as built in functions (like md5 hashes has been for a long time).

  Own Id: OTP-7128

• Minor improvements in the garbage collector.

  Own Id: OTP-7139 Aux Id: OTP-7132

• The switch "-detached" to the windows werl program now can create an erlang virtual machine without any main window and without a temporary console showing.

  Own Id: OTP-7142

• erlang:system_info/1 now accepts the logical_processors, and debug_compiled arguments. For more info see the, erlang(3) documentation.

  The scale factor returned by test_server:timetrap_scale_factor/0 is now also effected if the emulator uses a larger amount of scheduler threads than the amount of logical processors on the system.

  Own Id: OTP-7175

• A new BIF ets:update_element/3. To update individual elements within an ets-tuple, without having to read, update and write back the entire tuple.

  Own Id: OTP-7200

• A process executing the processes/0 BIF can now be preempted by other processes during its execution. This in order to disturb the rest of the system as little as possible. The returned result is, of course, still a consistent snapshot of existing processes at a time during the call to processes/0.

  The documentation of the processes/0 BIF and the is_process_alive/1 BIF have been updated in order to clarify the difference between an existing process and a process that is alive.

  Own Id: OTP-7213

1.16  Erts 5.6.1.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Not enough parameters were passed when sending an error report in erl_check_io.c (Thanks to Matthew Dempsky).

  Own Id: OTP-7176

• In rare circumstances, complex binary matching code could cause the emulator to crash or not match when it should. (Thanks to Rory Byrne.)

  Own Id: OTP-7198

Improvements and New Features

• The {allocator_sizes, Alloc} and alloc_util_allocators arguments are now accepted by erlang:system_info/1. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-7167

• The finishing reallocation of the heap block when hibernating a process is now always moving the heap block since it drastically reduces memory fragmentation when hibernating large amounts of processes.

  Own Id: OTP-7187

1.17  Erts 5.6.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The SMP emulator on sparc64 erroneously used the sparc32 atomic and the sparc32 spinlock implementations which caused it to crash.

  Own Id: OTP-7006

• Call tracing the new guard BIFs byte_size, bit_size, or tuple_size and the loading a module that uses one of those functions, could cause the emulator to terminate.

  Own Id: OTP-7008

• configuring --enable-darwin-universal or --enable-darwin-64bit on MacOSX could result in a non optimized emulator. Top level configure script now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-7014

• configuring --with-gd did not produce correct include flags for percept.

  Own Id: OTP-7015

• Environment variables weren't handled in thread safe manner in the runtime system with SMP support on Windows.

  erl_drv_putenv(), and erl_drv_getenv() has been introduced for use in drivers. Do not use putenv(), or getenv() directly in drivers. For more information see the erl_driver documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-7035

• HIPE: Corrected the choice of interface to the send/3 and setnode/3 BIFs for native-compiled code. Using the incorrect interface could, in unusual circumstances, lead to random runtime errors.

  Own Id: OTP-7067

• Garbage collections could become extremely slow when there were many keys in the process dictionary. (Thanks to Fredrik Svahn.)

  Own Id: OTP-7068

• The duplicate documentation directory in the windows installation is removed.

  Own Id: OTP-7070

• Documentation bugfixes and clarifications.

  (Thanks to Joern (opendev@gmail.com), Matthias Lang, and Richard Carlsson.)

  Own Id: OTP-7079

• The runtime system with SMP support not using the native atomic integer implementation part of OTP could deadlock when run on a system with more than one logical processor. That is, only the runtime system with SMP support on other hardware platforms than x86, x86_64, sparc32, and powerpc32 were effected by this bug.

  Own Id: OTP-7080

• The break handling code (run when Ctrl-C is hit) could could potentially deadlock the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-7104

• The sctp driver has been updated to work against newer lksctp packages e.g 1.0.7 that uses the API spelling change adaption -> adaptation. Older lksctp (1.0.6) still work. The erlang API in gen_sctp.erl and inet_sctp.hrl now spells 'adaptation' regardless of the underlying C API.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7120

• A bug in erlang:phash2/1 on 64-bit platforms has been fixed. (Thanks to Scott Lystig Fritchie.)

  Own Id: OTP-7127

• The emulator could under rare circumstances crash while garbage collecting.

  Own Id: OTP-7132

Improvements and New Features

• The documentation has been updated so as to reflect the last updates of the Erlang shell as well as the minor modifications of the control sequence p of the io_lib module.

  Superfluous empty lines have been removed from code examples and from Erlang shell examples.

  Own Id: OTP-6944 Aux Id: OTP-6554, OTP-6911

• Bit syntax construction with a small integer in a non-byte aligned field wider than the CPU's word size could cause garbage bits in the beginning of the field.

  Own Id: OTP-7085

• All Windows versions older than Windows 2000 are now not supported by the Erlang runtime system. This since there was a need for usage of features introduced in Windows 2000.

  Own Id: OTP-7086

• Memory management improvements especially for the runtime system with SMP support:

  • The runtime system with SMP support can now use multiple, thread specific instances of most memory allocators. This improves performance since it reduces lock contention in the memory allocators. It may however increase memory usage for some applications. The runtime system with SMP support will by default enable this feature on most allocators. The amount of instances used can be configured.
  • driver_alloc(), driver_realloc(), and driver_free() now use their own erts specific memory allocator instead of the default malloc() implementation on the system.
  • The default configuration of some allocators have been changed to fit applications that use much memory better.
  • Some new erts_alloc configuration parameters have been added.
  • erts_alloc_config has been modified to be able to create configurations suitable for multiple instances of allocators.
  • The returned value from erlang:system_info({allocator, Alloc}) has been changed. This since an allocator may now run in multiple instances.

  If you for some reason want the memory allocators to be configured as before, you can pass the +Mea r11b command-line argument to erl.

  For more information see the erts_alloc(3), the erts_alloc_config(3), and the erlang(3) documentation.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-7100

• On Unix, denormalized floating point numbers could not be created using list_to_float/1 or binary_to_term/1. (Thanks to Matthew Dempsky.)

  Own Id: OTP-7122

• Native atomic integers and spin-locks are now also available for the runtime system with SMP support on sparc64.

  Own Id: OTP-7130

• FP exceptions support for sparc64 userspace on Linux has been added. Note that FP exception support is now turned off by default, so to actually enable it you need to do './configure --enable-fp-exceptions'.

  Own Id: OTP-7131

1.18  Erts 5.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• A bug for raw files when reading 0 bytes returning 'eof' instead of empty data has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6291 Aux Id: OTP-6967

• All exported functions in gzio.c have now been renamed to avoid conflict with drivers that are indirectly linked with an external zlib library.

  Own Id: OTP-6816 Aux Id: OTP-6591

• On the 64-bit Erlang emulator, bit syntax construction with integers containing more than 60 bits ("big numbers") into fields with more than 60 bits could produce incorrect results.

  Own Id: OTP-6833

• When the runtime system failed to allocate memory for binaries, it could dead lock while writing the erl_crash.dump.

  Own Id: OTP-6848

• The runtime system with SMP support could deadlock if a process called the erlang:suspend_process(Pid) BIF or the erlang:garbage_collect(Pid) BIF while the process identified by Pid was currently running and the process calling the BIFs was terminated during the call to the BIFs.

  Processes suspending each other via the erlang:suspend_process/1 BIF or garbage collecting each other via the erlang:garbage_collect/1 BIF could deadlock each other when the runtime system with SMP support was used.

  Own Id: OTP-6920

• dbg could leave traced processes in a suspended state if the tracer process was killed with exit reason kill.

  erlang:suspend_process/2 has been introduced which accepts an option list as second argument. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Processes suspended via erlang:suspend_process/[1,2] will now be automatically resumed if the process that called erlang:suspend_process/[1,2] terminates.

  Processes could previously be suspended by one process and resumed by another unless someone was tracing the suspendee. This is not possible anymore. The process resuming a process has to be the one that suspended it.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6946

• file:write_file/3, file:write/2 and file:read/2 could crash (contrary to documentation) for odd enough file system problems, e.g write to full file system. This bug has now been corrected.

  In this process the file module has been rewritten to produce better error codes. Posix error codes now originate from the OS file system calls or are generated only for very similar causes (for example 'enomem' is generated if a memory allocation fails, and 'einval' is generated if the file handle in Erlang is a file handle but currently invalid).

  More Erlang-ish error codes are now generated. For example {error,badarg} is now returned from file:close/1 if the argument is not of a file handle type. See file(3).

  The possibility to write a single byte using file:write/2 instead of a list or binary of one byte, contradictory to the documentation, has been removed.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6967 Aux Id: OTP-6597 OTP-6291

• Monitor messages produced by the system monitor functionality, and garbage collect trace messages could contain erroneous heap and/or stack sizes when the actual heaps and/or stacks were huge.

  As of erts version 5.6 the large_heap option to erlang:system_monitor/[1,2] has been modified. The monitor message is sent if the sum of the sizes of all memory blocks allocated for all heap generations is equal to or larger than the specified size. Previously the monitor message was sent if the memory block allocated for the youngest generation was equal to or larger than the specified size.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6974 Aux Id: seq10796

• inet:getopts/2 returned random values on Windows Vista.

  Own Id: OTP-7003

Improvements and New Features

• The emulator internal process lock implementation has been rewritten and optimized. A slight risk of starvation existed in the previous implementation. This risk has also been eliminated in the new implementation.

  Own Id: OTP-6500

• Bitstrings (bit-level) binaries and binary comprehensions are now part of the language. See the Reference Manual.

  Own Id: OTP-6558

• The windows version of erlang now has SMP support. The SMP emulator is run by default on machines which shows more than one virtual or physical processor.

  Own Id: OTP-6560 Aux Id: OTP-6925

• The details of the compressed term format has been documented in erl_ext_dist.txt. (Thanks to Daniel Goertzen.)

  Own Id: OTP-6755

• The runtime system with SMP support is now started by default if more than one logical processor are detected. For more information, see the erl(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6756

• The external format for Erlang terms and the distribution protocol are now documented in ERTS User's Guide.

  Own Id: OTP-6779

• New BIF's erlang:system_profile/1 and erlang:system_profile/2. These BIF's controls concurrency profiling options for processes, ports and schedulers.

  Own Id: OTP-6783 Aux Id: OTP-6285

• The ErlDrvTermData term types used by driver_output_term() and driver_send_term() have been extended with the term types ERL_DRV_BUF2BINARY, ERL_DRV_EXT2TERM, and ERL_DRV_UINT. ERL_DRV_BUF2BINARY is used for passing and creating a binary, ERL_DRV_EXT2TERM is used for passing terms encoded with the external term format, and ERL_DRV_UINT is used for passing unsigned integers.

  Also the data types ErlDrvUInt and ErlDrvSInt have been added which makes it more obvious how arguments to term types are interpreted with regards to width and signedness.

  The incorrect data types ErlDriverTerm, ErlDriverBinary, and ErlDriverPort in the erl_driver(3) documentation have been replaced with the correct data types ErlDrvTermData, ErlDrvBinary, and ErlDrvPort.

  For more information see the erl_driver(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6823

• Miscellaneous improvements of the erts internal thread library.

  It now support optimized atomic operations and spin-locks on windows.

  Fall-backs based on mutexes and/or spin-locks for missing optimized atomic operations, spin-locks, or rwlocks has been implemented. This makes it possible to compile the runtime system with SMP support on a lot more platforms.

  Default stack size on OpenBSD has been increased to 256 kilo-words.

  Own Id: OTP-6831 Aux Id: OTP-6560

• Many bit syntax operations, both construction and matching, are faster. For further information, see the Efficiency Guide.

  Own Id: OTP-6838

• Literal lists, tuples, and binaries are no longer constructed at run-time as they used to be, but are stored in a per-module constant pool. Literals that are used more than once are stored only once.

  This is not a change to the language, only in the details of its implementation. Therefore, the implications of this change is described in the Efficiency Guide.

  Example 1: In the expression element(BitNum-1, {1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128}), the tuple used to be constructed every time the expression was executed, which could be detrimental to performance in two ways if the expression was executed in a loop: the time to build the tuple itself and the time spent in garbage collections because the heap filled up with garbage faster.

  Example 2: Literal strings, such as "abc", used to be stored in the compiled code compactly as a byte string and expanded to a list at run-time. Now all strings will be stored expanded to lists (such as [$a,$b,$c]) in the constant pool. That means that the string will be faster to use at run-time, but that it will require more space even when not used. If space is an issue, you might want to use binary literals (that is, <<"abc">>) instead of string literals for infrequently used long strings (such as error messages).

  Own Id: OTP-6850

• The Erlang driver API has been extended with a portable POSIX thread like API for multi-threading. The Erlang driver thread API provides:

  • Threads
  • Mutexes
  • Condition variables
  • Read/Write locks
  • Thread specific data

  For more information see the erl_driver(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6857

• Recursive calls now usually consume less stack than in R11B. See the Efficiency Guide.

  Own Id: OTP-6862 Aux Id: seq10746

• The deprecated BIFs erlang:old_binary_to_term/1 and erlang:info/1 have been removed.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6876

• Calls to driver call-backs triggered by external events are now scheduled and interleaved with execution of Erlang processes also on the runtime system without SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6878

• Faster arithmetic of integers of more than 27 bits signed (or 60 bits signed on an 64-bit CPU), and also faster integer multiplication. (Thanks to Tony Rogvall.)

  Own Id: OTP-6891

• Significant improvements of the process_info BIFs:

  • process_info/2 can now be called with a list of items as second argument in order to atomically retrieve information about multiple items.
  • process_info/[1,2] has been optimized in the runtime system with SMP support. The whole scheduler could previously be blocked for a significant period of time in process_info/[1,2] waiting for a lock on the process being inspected. The Erlang process calling process_info/[1,2] can still be blocked for a significant period of time waiting for the lock, but the scheduler will now be able to run other processes while the process calling process_info/[1,2] waits for the lock.
  • process_info/2 now accept a few more items than before.
  • The documentation of process_info/[1,2] has been improved.

  For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6899

• open_port({}, []) could crash the emulator. (Thanks to Matthew Dempsky.)

  Own Id: OTP-6901

• Two new guard BIFs have been introduced as a recommended replacement for size/1. (The size/1 BIF will be removed no earlier than in R14B.) The BIFs are tuple_size/1 to calculate the size of a tuple and byte_size/1 to calculate the number of bytes needed for the contents of the binary or bitstring (rounded up to the nearest number of bytes if necessary).

  There is also a new bit_size/1 BIF that returns the exact number of bits that a binary or bitstring contains.

  Own Id: OTP-6902

• The ets:fixtable/2 function, which has been deprecated for several releases, has been removed.

  The ets:info/1 function has been reimplemented as a BIF, which guarantees that information returned is consistent.

  The ets:info/2 function now fails with reason badarg if the second argument is invalid. (Dialyzer can be used to find buggy code where the second argument is misspelled.)

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6906

• As the linux kernel may generate a minor fault when tracing with CPU timestamps, and there exists no patch to the Linux kernel that fixes the problem, cpu timestamps are disabled on Linux for now.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6922

• The functions io:columns/0, io:columns/1, io:rows/0 and io:rows/1 are added to allow the user to get information about the terminal geometry. The shell takes some advantage of this when formatting output. For regular files and other io-devices where height and width are not applicable, the functions return {error,enotsup}.

  Potential incompatibility: If one has written a custom io-handler, the handler has to either return an error or take care of io-requests regarding terminal height and width. Usually that is no problem as io-handlers, as a rule of thumb, should give an error reply when receiving unknown io-requests, instead of crashing.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6933

• driver_caller() can now also be used from the start callback of a driver.

  Own Id: OTP-6951

• The emulator can now be compiled for 64bit intel, as well as a 32bit universal binary on darwin/MacOSX 10.4 and 10.5.

  Own Id: OTP-6961

• If open_port fails because all available ports are already in use, it will now throw a system_limit exception instead of an enfile exception. (enfile might still be thrown if the operating system would return ENFILE.)

  Own Id: OTP-6968

• The spawn_monitor/1 and spawn_monitor/3 BIFs are now auto-imported (i.e. they no longer need an erlang: prefix).

  Own Id: OTP-6975

• On Windows, the werl window now handles resize, so that the whole window can be utilized. Text selection is also updated to be line oriented instead of rectangle oriented as in earlier versions.

  Own Id: OTP-6994 Aux Id: OTP-6933

• Kqueue support (kernel-poll) has been enabled on FreeBSD. The problem with kqueue not detecting writes on a pipe on FreeBSD was actually not a kqueue issue, but a writev on pipes issue. Neither poll(), nor select() detected the write when the bug hit. NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD probably have or have had the same bug. This bug should have been fixed in FreeBSD 6.3 and FreeBSD 7.0 thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pedron.

  Own Id: OTP-7001

1.19  Erts 5.5.5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Hanging writes on temporarily unavailable NFS filesystems could cause the execution of (not file related) erlang code to get blocked even though I/O threads were used. This is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6907 Aux Id: seq10771

1.20  Erts 5.5.5.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Data passed to a driver via erlang:port_call could be corrupted when the runtime system with SMP support was used. (Thanks to YAMASHINA Hio.)

  Own Id: OTP-6879

• In the SMP emulator, if several processes called ets:update_counter/3 (even for different tables) when the counter values exceeded 27 bits, the counter values could be corrupted or the emulator could crash.

  Own Id: OTP-6880 Aux Id: seq10760

1.21  Erts 5.5.5.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Creating a named table using ets:new/2 or renaming a named table using ets:rename/2 could in rare circumstances succeed, meaning that there would be two or more tables with the same name. Now such call will fail with a badarg exception as it is supposed to do.

  ets:delete/1 used on a named table now removes the name immediately so that a new table with the same name can be created.

  Turning on call trace on the internal BIF that implements ets:delete/1 would crash the emulator.

  SMP emulator only: Using ets:rename/2 on a table that ets:safe_fixtable/2 has been used on could cause an emulator crash or undefined behaviour because of a missing lock.

  Own Id: OTP-6872 Aux Id: seq10756, seq10757

1.22  Erts 5.5.5.2

Known Bugs and Problems

• ets:select/3 on ordered_set and with a chunksize a multiple of 1000 gave all elements instead of just 1000. Also ets:slot/2 on ordered set could give unexpected results on SMP emulator. Both problems are corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6842

1.23  Erts 5.5.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• All exported functions in gzio.c have now been renamed to avoid conflict with drivers that are indirectly linked with an external zlib library.

  Own Id: OTP-6816 Aux Id: OTP-6591

• Calling binary_to_term/1 with certain invalid binaries would crash the emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-6817

Improvements and New Features

• Restored speed of bit-syntax matching of 32 bits integers.

  Own Id: OTP-6789 Aux Id: seq10688

1.24  Erts 5.5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The functions in gzio.c have been renamed to avoid conflict with drivers that indirectly linked with an external zlib library.

  Own Id: OTP-6591

• The emulator without SMP support dumped core if an async-thread finished a job after the emulator had begun writing an erl_crash.dump.

  Own Id: OTP-6685

• In bit syntax matching, integer fields with greater size than 16Mb would fail to match. (Thanks to Bertil Karlsson and Francesco Pierfederici.)

  Matching out a 32-bit integer not aligned on a byte boundary from a binary could cause an heap overflow (and subsequent termination of the emulator).

  A module that contained bit syntax construction with a literal field size greater than 16Mb would fail to load.

  Several other similar bugs having to do with huge field sizes were eliminated.

  Attempting to construct a binary longer than 536870911 bytes will now fail with a system_limit exception (rather than fail in mysterious ways or construct an binary with incorrect contents). Similarily, attempting to match a binary longer than 536870911 bytes will now fail (instead of producing an incorrect result). This limitation has been documented in the Efficiency Guide. (The limit is in the 32-bit emulator; use the 64-bit emulator if you need to handle larger binaries than 536870911.)

  Own Id: OTP-6686

• Bugs in rem and div of very large numbers are corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6692

• erlang:system_info({allocator, Alloc}) didn't allocate enough heap when a bignum was part of the result which could cause an emulator crash.

  Own Id: OTP-6693

• It was previously not possible to pass erts_alloc the same configuration via the command-line, as used by default.

  A +M* command-line argument that configure a size of some sort can now be passed a value that equals the size of the address space. The value used, in this case, will be "the size of the address space" - 1.

  Own Id: OTP-6699

• SysIOVec* driver_peekq(ErlDrvPort port, int *vlen) did not update *vlen if port was invalid. *vlen is now set to -1 if the port is invalid.

  The efile driver expects *vlen to be updated also when the port is invalid. This situation occurs seldom, but when the runtime system has async-threads enabled and ports are killed it can. When it occurred the runtime system crashed.

  Own Id: OTP-6729

Improvements and New Features

• For scripts written using escript, there is a new function escript:script_name/0, which can be used to retrieve the pathame of the script. The documentation has been clarified regarding pre-defined macros such as ?MODULE and the module name.

  Own Id: OTP-6593

• The section Guards in the chapter The Abstract Format of the ERTS User's Guide has been updated.

  Own Id: OTP-6600

• Corrected protocol layer flue for socket options SO_LINGER, SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF, for SCTP.

  Own Id: OTP-6625 Aux Id: OTP-6336

• The behaviour of the inet option {active,once} on peer close is improved and documented.

  Own Id: OTP-6681

• The inet option send_timeout for connection oriented sockets is added to allow for timeouts in communicating send requests to the underlying TCP stack.

  Own Id: OTP-6684 Aux Id: seq10637 OTP-6681

• The command line flag -args_file FileName, and the environment variables ERL_AFLAGS, and ERL_ZFLAGS for the erl command have been added. For more information see the erl(1) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6697

• The is_constant/1 type test has been deprecated. is_constant/1 is improperly named and almost entirely undocumented.

  Own Id: OTP-6731

1.25  Erts 5.5.4.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• process_flag(trap_exit, Bad) where Bad was a term not equal to true or false, didn't fail with badarg as it should; instead, the failure was silently ignored. This bug was introduced in erts-5.5.2.

  Own Id: OTP-6627 Aux Id: OTP-6160

• The minimum and default stack size for async-threads has been increased to 16 kilowords. This since the previous minimum and default stack size of 8 kilowords proved to be too small (introduced in erts-5.5.4.2).

  Own Id: OTP-6628 Aux Id: OTP-6580, Seq10633

Improvements and New Features

• process_flag/2 accepts the new flag sensitive.

  Own Id: OTP-6592 Aux Id: seq10555

1.26  Erts 5.5.4.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• When a port steals control over a file descriptor from another port, the stealing port tests if the other port is alive. This in order to be able to give an accurate error message. In the runtime system with SMP support, this test was done without appropriate locks held. This could in worst case lead to an erroneous error message; therefore, this bug is to be considered harmless.

  Own Id: OTP-6602

Improvements and New Features

• The default stack size for threads in the async-thread pool has been shrunk to 8 kilowords, i.e., 32 KB on 32-bit architectures. This small default size has been chosen since the amount of async-threads might be quite large. The default stack size is enough for drivers delivered with Erlang/OTP, but might not be sufficiently large for other dynamically linked in drivers that use the driver_async() functionality. A suggested stack size for threads in the async-thread pool can be configured via the +a command line argument of erl(1).

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6580

1.27  Erts 5.5.4.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Setting the time on the system while using heart on a linux machine where the emulator was built with clock_gettime support (default from Linux 2.6/erts-5.5.4 and upwards), could make the heart command fire. This was due to bug in the heart executable which is now corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6598 Aux Id: seq10614

1.28  Erts 5.5.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Corrected misspelling of '-pz' in the help text for erlc. (Thanks to Ulf Wiger.)

  Own Id: OTP-6433

• The MD5 calculation of a BEAM file done by code:module_md5/1, beam_lib:md5/1, and by the compiler for the default value of the vsn attribute have all been changed so that its result will be the same on all platforms; modules containing funs could get different MD5s on different platforms.

  Own Id: OTP-6459

• The emulator could dump core while writing an erl_crash.dump file if there were funs with a large terms in its environment. Since there is no way to inspect a fun's environment in the crashdump_viewer application anyway, a variables in the environment are now set to [] before dumping the fun. (Thanks to Jean-Sebastien Pedron.)

  Own Id: OTP-6504

• {Port, {exit_status, S}} messages from ports opened with the exit_status option could under rare circumstances be delayed. This bug was present on Erlang runtime systems without SMP support on all unix operating systems other than SunOS.

  Own Id: OTP-6528

• A bug in linuxthreads could cause the emulator to dump core when dlerror() was called before the first call to dlopen(). As a workaround the emulator always makes a call to dlopen() on initialization when linuxthreads is used as thread library.

  Own Id: OTP-6530

• file:sync/1 did not do anything on Windows. Now it calls the system function for flushing buffers (FlushFileBuffers()). (Thanks to Matthew Sackman.)

  Own Id: OTP-6531

• open_port/2 could on the runtime system with SMP support fail with the wrong exit reason when a port couldn't be created. When this happened the exit reason was typically eintr, or ebusy instead of eagain.

  Own Id: OTP-6536

• The file driver (efile_drv) did not flush data written using the option 'delayed_write' after the set timeout time, rather at the next file operation. This bug has now been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6538

Improvements and New Features

• An interface towards the SCTP Socket API Extensions has been implemented.It is an Open Source patch courtesy of Serge Aleynikov and Leonid Timochouk. The Erlang code parts has been adapted by the OTP team, changing the Erlang API somewhat.

  The Erlang interface consists of the module gen_sctp and an include file -include_lib("kernel/include/inet_sctp.hrl"). for option record definitions. The gen_sctp module is documented.

  The delivered Open Source patch, before the OTP team rewrites, was written according to http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tsvwg-sctpsocket-13 and was claimed to work fine, tested on Linux Fedora Core 5.0 (kernel 2.6.15-2054 or later) and on Solaris 10 and 11. The OTP team rewrites used the same standard document but might have accidentally broken some functionality. If so it will soon be patched to working state. The tricky parts in C and the general design has essentially not changed. During the rewrites the code was hand tested on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and briefly on Solaris 10. Feedbach on code and docs is very much appreciated.

  The SCTP interface is in beta state. It has only been hand tested and has no automatic test suites in OPT meaning everything is most certainly not tested. Socket active mode is broken. IPv6 is not tested. The documentation has been reworked due to the API changes, but has not been proofread after this.

  Thank you from the OTP team to Serge Aleynikov and Leonid Timochouk for a valuable contribution. We hope we have not messed it up too much.

  Own Id: OTP-6336

• A {minor_version,Version} option is now recognized by term_to_binary/2. {minor_version,1} will cause floats to be encoded in an exact and more space-efficient way compared to the previous encoding.

  Own Id: OTP-6434

• There is a new escript program that can be used for writing scripts in Erlang. Erlang scripts don't need to be compiled and any arguments can be passed to them without risk that they are interpreted by the Erlang system.

  Own Id: OTP-6505

• Setting and getting socket options in a "raw" fashion is now allowed. Using this feature will inevitably produce non portable code, but will allow setting ang getting arbitrary uncommon options on TCP stacks that do have them.

  Own Id: OTP-6519

• Miscellaneous signal handling improvements on the Erlang runtime system with SMP support.

  The fallback implementation of spin locks and atomic operations are now implemented using pthread spin locks when pthread spin locks are found on the system.

  The Erlang runtime system with SMP support can now run on Linux systems that has Linuxthreads instead of NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library). Note that the SMP support hasn't been as thoroughly tested with Linuxthreads as with NPTL. A runtime system with SMP support will therefore not be built by default on Linux when NPTL isn't found. In order to force a build of the runtime system with SMP support, pass --enable-smp-support to configure when building OTP.

  Own Id: OTP-6525

1.29  Erts 5.5.3.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• erlang:system_flag(multi_scheduling, block) could cause the emulator with SMP support to deadlock.

  Own Id: OTP-6431 Aux Id: OTP-6403

• The runtime system with SMP support failed to call the driver timeout callback of ports in state closing. This could cause ports to fail flushing their I/O queues.

  Own Id: OTP-6432

• The {Port, closed} message from a closed port could arrive at the port owner before Port had been removed from the result of erlang:ports/0 in the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6437

• The async id of async jobs created via driver_async wasn't created in a thread safe manner in the runtime system with SMP support. This could in worst case cause driver_async_cancel() to cancel another async job than intended.

  Own Id: OTP-6438

• Under rare circumstances a terminating connection between two nodes could cause an instantaneous reconnect between the two nodes to fail on the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6447

• In the documentation of the driver entry field extended_marker of erts version 5.5.3 (driver_entry(3)), the following is stated: "The following fields are ignored if this field is equal to 0". This is a documentation bug and has been changed to: "If this field is equal to 0, all the fields following this field also have to be 0, or NULL in case it is a pointer field".

  The runtime check for detection of old incompatible drivers made when loading drivers has been improved. The emulator can, however, not make sure that a driver that doesn't use the extended driver interface isn't incompatible. Therefore, when loading a driver that doesn't use the extended driver interface, there is a risk that it will be loaded also when the driver is incompatible. When the driver use the extended driver interface, the emulator can verify that it isn't of an incompatible driver version. You are therefore advised to use the extended driver interface.

  For more information see the erl_driver(3) and driver_entry(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6452 Aux Id: OTP-6330

• When terminating ports on the runtime system with SMP support, removal of links to processes was done without locking the link lock on processes. This could cause an emulator crash.

  Own Id: OTP-6475

• The emulator with SMP support could crash when a port flushed its I/O queue by calling driver_async() from the timeout driver callback.

  Own Id: OTP-6479

• Large exit reasons could under rare circumstances cause the runtime system with SMP support to crash.

  Own Id: OTP-6521

Improvements and New Features

• Faster system calls for keeping the time accurate are used on newer Linux kernels, which can result in a significant speed-up of the emulator on those systems.

  Own Id: OTP-6430

• Added number of async threads and number of scheduler threads to the system information that can be retrieved via driver_system_info(). For more information see the erl_driver(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6440

• When SIGUSR1 is received by the runtime system with SMP support, the erl_crash.dump is now written by a special thread, instead of as before directly from the signal handler.

  Own Id: OTP-6465

• term_to_binary/2 with compression is now faster.

  term_to_binary/2 now accepts the option '{compressed,Level}' for specifying the compression level. Level must be in the range 0 (no compression) through 9 (highest compression level). Default is 6.

  Future compatibility bugfix: binary_to_term/1 did not handle the Uniq and Index fields correctly.

  Own Id: OTP-6494

• Removed unnecessary reallocation when initializing kernel-poll set.

  Own Id: OTP-6516

1.30  Erts 5.5.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Node and fun table entries could under rare circumstances be deallocated multiple times on the emulator with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6369

• epoll_wait() can repeat entries for the same file descriptor in the result array. This could cause the ready_input, ready_output, or event callbacks of a driver to unintentionally be called multiple times. We have only noted repeated entries when an error condition has occurred on the file descriptor. In this case, the repeated entries should normally not be a problem for the driver since it should detect the error and de-select the file descriptor. Therefore this bug should be considered harmless. The emulator now coalesce repeated entries into one.

  You are only affected by this bug if you are using erts-5.5.2.* and the kernel-poll feature on linux.

  Own Id: OTP-6376 Aux Id: OTP-6222

• If a process that was waiting in gen_tcp:accept/1 was killed, calling gen_tcp:accept/1 again on the same listen socket would fail with '{error,einval}'.

  Own Id: OTP-6381 Aux Id: seq10535

• The emulator failed to start on Solaris 10 when kernel-poll support was enabled and the maximum number of filedescriptors configured was less than or equal to 256.

  Own Id: OTP-6384 Aux Id: OTP-6222

• The R10B compiler could generate unsafe bs_save/bs_restore instructions that could cause memory corruption. (The R11B compiler does not have that problem.) The erlang emulator will now refuse to load R10B-compiled modules that contain such unsafe bs_save/bs_restore instructions. In addition, the beam_validator module in the compiler will also reject such instructions (in case it is used to validate R10B code). (Thanks to Matthew Reilly.)

  Own Id: OTP-6386

• Process and port timers could fail to work properly on the runtime system with SMP support. Many thanks to Dmitriy Kargapolov and Serge Aleynikov who tracked down this bug.

  Own Id: OTP-6387

• Bit syntax code compiled by an R10B compiler that matched out a floating point number would not properly check that the floating point number was valid; if the float was, for instance, NaN the emulator could crash.

  Own Id: OTP-6395

• statistics(runtime) on Windows used to return the elapsed system time for the process, instead of the user time. Corrected. (Thanks to Robert Virding.)

  Own Id: OTP-6407

• A loadable driver (loaded by erl_ddll) which used driver_async() would cause the emulator to crash. (Thanks to Dmitriy Kargapolov.)

  Own Id: OTP-6410

• Under rare circumstances the emulator on unix platforms could fail to terminate the Erlang port corresponding to a port program opened with the exit_status option.

  Own Id: OTP-6411

• A link removed via unlink/1 could under rare circumstances transfer exit signals for a short period of time after the call to unlink/1 had returned when the runtime system with SMP support was used.

  Own Id: OTP-6425 Aux Id: OTP-6160

Improvements and New Features

• In the runtime system with SMP support, ports are now being scheduled on the scheduler threads interleaved with processes instead of being run in a separate I/O thread.

  Own Id: OTP-6262

• More interfaces are added in erl_ddll, to support different usage scenarios.

  Own Id: OTP-6307 Aux Id: OTP-6234

• In the runtime system with SMP support, the global I/O lock has been replaced with a more fine grained port locking scheme. Port locking is either done on driver level, i.e., all ports executing the same driver share a lock, or on port level, i.e., each port has its own lock. Currently the inet driver, the efile driver, and the spawn driver use port level locking and all other statically linked in drivers use driver level locking. By default dynamically linked in drivers will use locking on driver level. For more information on how to enable port level locking see the erl_driver(3) and the driver_entry(3) man pages.

  As of erts version 5.5.3 the driver interface has been extended. The extended interface introduce version management, the possibility to pass capability flags to the runtime system at driver initialization, and some new driver API functions. For example, the driver_system_info() function which can be used to determine if the driver is run in a runtime system with SMP support or not. The extended interface doesn't have to be used, but dynamically linked in driver have to be recompiled. For information see the erl_driver(3) and the driver_entry(3) man pages.

  NOTE: Dynamically linked in drivers have to be recompiled.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6330 Aux Id: OTP-6262

• A test and debug feature which modifies the timing of the runtime system has been added. For more information, see documentation of the +T<Level> command line argument of erl(1).

  Own Id: OTP-6382

• The version of zlib (http://zlib.net) linked into run-time system has been updated to version 1.2.3.

  Own Id: OTP-6394

• The erlc program now passes on the -smp and -hybrid options to the Erlang emulator it starts. This is mainly useful for compiling native code, because native code must be compiled with same type of run-time system as in which it will be run.

  If the -s option is given, erlc now prints a warning that it is deprecated and that it will be removed in R12B.

  Own Id: OTP-6398

• The schedulers option of erlang:system_flag/2 has been removed, i.e., the number of scheduler threads cannot be changed after emulator boot time any more.

  A multi_scheduling option has been added to erlang:system_flag/2. This option can be used for blocking and unblocking multi-scheduling. For more information see the erlang(3) documentation.

  Own Id: OTP-6403

• A port program that had been started with the exit_status option and closed one of the pipes used for communication with the emulator caused the emulator to continuously poll for termination of the port program. This only became a problem when the emulator didn't have other things to do and the port program closed a pipe much earlier than it terminated. When the emulator had other things to do, such as running Erlang processes, the emulator polled for termination in between scheduling of processes.

  Now the emulator doesn't poll for termination of the port program at all; instead, it waits for the child signal from the terminated port program to arrive and then schedules the Erlang port for termination.

  The termination of any port programs have also been optimized. Previously the termination of any port program did always cause a scan of a table of the size equal to maximum number of file descriptors. If the maximum number of file descriptors was large, this scan could be quite expensive. Now the search have been reduced to the set of ports started with the exit_status option.

  Note, all of the above only applies to Erlang emulators on Unix platforms.

  Own Id: OTP-6412 Aux Id: seq10194

• * BEAM: added support for floating-point exceptions on FreeBSD (32-bit x86)

  * SMP: made locking procedures work even when native lock operations aren't implemented

  * SMP: improved timing accuracy in the timer thread (if enabled)

  Own Id: OTP-6424

1.31  Erts 5.5.2.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• A bug in the kernel poll implementation could cause the emulator to omit polling for events on file descriptors. The bug was only present when using the kernel poll implementation based on epoll or kqueue. This bug was introduced in erts-5.5.2.

  Own Id: OTP-6344 Aux Id: OTP-6222

1.32  Erts 5.5.2.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The run_erl program now acquires its pseudo-ttys using openpty(3), so that it will work on newer Linux distributions that don't have the traditional pseudo-tty devices in the file system. On platforms that don't have openpty(3), run_erl will still search for pseudo-tty devices in the file system.

  The run_erl program will now wait using waitpid(3) to prevent the program it spawned to become defunct. run_erl will also terminate after a delay of 5 seconds (to allow any pending output to be written to the log file) if the spawned program terminates even if some child of it still holds stdin and/or stdout open.

  Own Id: OTP-6225 Aux Id: seq10500

• A bug in ordered_set ETS datatyp caused ets:select (and match) to return faulty results when the table contained process id's from another node.

  Own Id: OTP-6338

1.33  Erts 5.5.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• erlc: A typo in the help text for '-pa path' was corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6218

• Failure in port command/control driver callbacks could crash the non-SMP emulator. This bug was introduced in the 5.5 version of erts.

  Own Id: OTP-6224

• Erroneous "Input driver gone away without deselecting!" error reports could sometimes occur when a driver instance terminated in the ready_output() callback of the driver. This bug was only present in emulators that used poll(). Note, that this bug was harmless, the only effect it had was the erroneous error report.

  Own Id: OTP-6229 Aux Id: OTP-3993, Seq5266, Seq7247, OTP-4307

• The emulator could cause a type assertion failure while writing an erl_crash.dump, causing the erl_crash.dump to be terminated and a core dump generated.

  Own Id: OTP-6235 Aux Id: seq10444

• The registered name of a process is now the last observable resource removed before links and monitors are triggered when a process terminates.

  Previously ets tables were removed after the registered name. This could cause problems on the runtime system with SMP support for code that expected that ets tables owned by a specific process had been removed if the name of the process had been removed.

  Own Id: OTP-6237

• Failure to fork() a new (os) process could cause the emulator to deadlock. This bug affect all emulators with SMP support, and emulators with async thread support on SunOS.

  Own Id: OTP-6241 Aux Id: OTP-3906

• Fprof traces could become truncated for the SMP emulator. This bug has now been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-6246

• The undocumented functions inet:getiflist/0,1 inet:ifget/2,3 and inet:getif/1 were completely broken on Windows. That has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-6255

• Behavior in case of disappeared nodes when using the dist_auto_connect once got changed in R11B-1. The timeouts regarding normal distributed operations is now reverted to the old (pre R11B-1).

  Own Id: OTP-6258 Aux Id: OTP-6200, seq10449

• The bsl and bsr operators could cause the emulator to crash if given invalid arguments. (Thanks to datacompboy and Per Gustafsson.)

  Own Id: OTP-6259

• driver_cancel_timer() could under certain circumstances fail to cancel the timer on the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6261

• A call to erlang:system_info(info) could deadlock the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6268

Improvements and New Features

• Exit signals are now truly asynchronous in the runtime system with SMP support. This simplifies locking in bifs a lot, and makes process termination cheaper.

  Own Id: OTP-6160

• When tracing on the runtime system with SMP support it can be difficult to know when a trace has been delivered to the tracer. A new built in function erlang:trace_delivered/1 has been introduced in order to make it easier to know when the trace has been delivered. See the erlang(3) man page for more information.

  Own Id: OTP-6205 Aux Id: OTP-6269

• Kernel poll support can now be combined with SMP support. Currently the following kernel poll versions exist: /dev/poll, epoll, and kqueue. Linux kpoll has been replaced with epoll. Some time in the future there will also be a kernel poll version using Solaris event ports.

  The "check io" implementation for unix has been completely rewritten. The current kernel poll implementation reduce the amount of system calls needed compared to the old kernel poll implementation.

  When epoll or kqueue is used either poll or select is used as fallback. Previously only poll could be used as fallback. Since select now can be used as fallback, kernel poll support is now also available on newer MacOSX. Note however, when select is used as fallback, the maximum number of file descriptors is limited to FD_SETSIZE.

  Kernel poll support is now enabled by default if /dev/poll, epoll, or kqueue is found when building OTP, i.e. you do not have to pass the --enable-kernel-poll argument to configure. As before, kernel poll is disabled by default in the runtime system. In order to enable it, pass the +Ktrue command line argument to erl.

  Note: configure will refuse to enable kernel poll support on FreeBSD since kqueue have problems with (at least) pipes on all version of FreeBSD that we have tested.

  Own Id: OTP-6222 Aux Id: seq10380

• The erl_ddll module and the code in the emulator have been completely rewritten; several bugs were fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-6234

• The SMP emulator now avoids locking for the following operations (thus making them as fast as in the UP emulator): atom_to_list/1, atom comparison, atom hashing, erlang:apply/3.

  Own Id: OTP-6252

• There are new BIFs erlang:spawn_monitor/1,3, and the new option monitor for spawn_opt/2,3,4,5.

  The observer_backend module has been updated to handle the new BIFs.

  Own Id: OTP-6281

1.34  Erts 5.5.1.1

Improvements and New Features

• There is now an option read_packets for UDP sockets that sets the maximum number of UDP packets that will be read for each invocation of the socket driver.

  Own Id: OTP-6249 Aux Id: seq10452

1.35  Erts 5.5.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Complex pattern matching of strings would fail in the 64 bits emulator because of a bug in the loader. (Thanks to Igor Goryachev.)

  Own Id: OTP-6142

• -134217728 div 134217728 and -134217728 rem 134217728 would be calculated incorrectly. abs(-2147483648) could in unlucky circumstances cause a heap overflow, as could size(Binary) when size of the binary was larger than 128Mb.

  Own Id: OTP-6154

• erlang:display/1 displayed erroneous values for negative integers.

  Big integers (both positive and negative) were previously displayed in hexadecimal form while small integers were displayed in decimal form. All integers are now displayed in decimal form.

  NOTE: erlang:display/1 should only be used for debugging.

  Own Id: OTP-6156

• A call to erlang:trace/3 with erroneous flags caused the SMP emulator to deadlock instead of exiting the calling process with badarg.

  Own Id: OTP-6175

• A bug causing the emulator to hang when exiting a process that is exception traced has been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-6180

• ets:rename/1 could deadlock, or crash the SMP emulator when the table wasn't a named table.

  ets:next/2, and ets:prev/2 could return erroneous results on the SMP emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-6198 Aux Id: seq10392, seq10415

• A memory allocation bug could cause the SMP emulator to crash when a process had executed a receive after with a larger timeout than 10 minutes.

  Own Id: OTP-6199

• The runtime system with SMP support did not slowly adjust it's view of time when the system time suddenly changed.

  Timeouts could sometimes timeout too early on the runtime system with SMP support.

  Own Id: OTP-6202

Improvements and New Features

• The smp runtime system now automatically detects the number of logical processors on MacOSX (darwin) and OpenBSD.

  The smp runtime system is now built by default on MacOSX (darwin) on x86.

  Own Id: OTP-6119

• The -smp command line argument now take the following options: enable, auto, or disable.

  Especially the -smpauto argument is useful since it starts the Erlang runtime system with SMP support if it is available and more than one logical processor are detected; otherwise, it starts the Erlang runtime system without SMP support. For more information see the erl(1) man page.

  Own Id: OTP-6126

• Increased the reduction cost for sending messages in the SMP emulator so it behaves more like the non-SMP emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-6196

• A port running a dynamically linked-in driver that exits due to the driver being unloaded now exits with exit reason driver_unloaded. Previously the port exited with exit reason -1.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6204

• Changed name of the erlang:system_info/1 argument scheduler to scheduler_id. This since the scheduler argument so easily could be mixed up with the schedulers argument (both returning integers).

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6208

• The changes below were made by Mikael Pettersson, HiPE.

  HiPE runtime system:

  Reduce overheads in the HiPE runtime system's BIF glue code.

  Fix bug when exceptions are thrown from BEAM to HiPE.

  Support SPARC on Linux.

  Support x86 on FreeBSD.

  Floating-point exceptions:

  Reduce overheads in checking results of floating-point operations.

  Minor bug fix in SSE2 floating-point exception handling.

  Support SSE2 floating-point exceptions on 32-bit x86 machines.

  Make FP exceptions work in the SMP runtime system on FreeBSD/x86.

  Support floating-point exceptions on SPARCs running Linux.

  Runtime system:

  Minor scheduler optimisation in the non-SMP runtime system.

  Substantial reduction of I/O thread overheads in the SMP runtime system if the separate timer thread is used. (In R11B-1, the separate timer thread is not used.)

  Own Id: OTP-6211

1.36  ERTS 5.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Previously unlink/1 and erlang:demonitor/2 behaved completely asynchronous. This had one undesirable effect, though. You could never know when you were guaranteed not to be affected by a link that you had unlinked or a monitor that you had demonitored.

  The new behavior of unlink/1 and erlang:demonitor/2 can be viewed as two operations performed atomically. Asynchronously send an unlink signal or a demonitor signal, and ignore any future results of the link or monitor.

  NOTE: This change can cause some obscure code to fail which previously did not. For example, the following code might hang:

              Mon = erlang:monitor(process, Pid),
  \011    %% ...
  \011    exit(Pid, bang),
              erlang:demonitor(Mon),
  \011    receive
  \011        {'DOWN', Mon , process, Pid, _} -> ok
  \011    %% We were previously guaranteed to get a down message
  \011    %% (since we exited the process ourself), so we could
  \011    %% in this case leave out:
  \011    %% after 0 -> ok
  \011    end,
            

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-5772

• Two bugs fixed: If the environment variable ERL_FLAGS was set, its contents would be appended to the end of the command line even if the command line had an -extra options. Changed to place the options from ERL_FLAGS just before -extra. Also, the -smp and -hybrid flags no longer have any effect if placed after -extra.

  Own Id: OTP-6054

Improvements and New Features

• The documentation for writing drivers in the ERTS User's Guide has been expanded and updated.

  Own Id: OTP-5192

• The andalso and orelse operators are now allowed to be used in guards. That also applies to match specifications.

  Own Id: OTP-5894 Aux Id: OTP-5149

• There is a new trace match spec function {exception_trace} and a corresponding trace message exception_from that can be used to trace on any exit from a function, both normal function return and exception return. See the documentation for details.

  The return_to trace message is now also generated when the execution returns to a function due to catching an exception.

  Own Id: OTP-5956

• Erlang runtime system with SMP (symmetric multi processing) support.

  The runtime system with SMP support is in this release focused on stability and there are a number of steps with optimizations to follow before it will take full advantage of multi processor systems. The released system is however truly multi threaded and you will notice increased performance for many applications already. We recommend that you evaluate your application on the SMP version of the runtime system and wait for some more optimizations before you use it in a real product. You will then discover if there are any problems in your application that needs to be fixed in order for it to work properly in a multi threaded environment. More optimized versions of the runtime system with SMP support will be included in the R11B maintenance releases.

  The SMP enabled runtime system will be started if the -smp command line argument is passed to the erl command. In order to make use of more than one processor core, multiple scheduler threads are used. By default, the number of scheduler threads will equal the number of processor cores. The number of scheduler threads can be set with the +S command line argument. For more information see the erl(1) man page.

  A runtime system with SMP support is by default built on the following platforms if posix threads, and a gcc compiler of at least version 2.95 is found:

  • Linux with at least kernel version 2.6 and the Native POSIX Thread Library on x86, x86_64, and 32-bits PowerPC.

  • Solaris of at least version 8 on 32-bits SPARC-V9.

  • MacOSX of at least version 10.4 (Darwin 8.0) on 32-bits PowerPC.

  The runtime system with SMP support is known not to build on:

  • Windows.

  • Linux with kernel versions less than 2.4, or without the Native POSIX Thread Library.

  • Other hardware platforms than x86, x86_64, 32-bits SPARC-V9 and 32-bits PowerPC.

  Windows will be supported in a future release.

  The runtime system with SMP support might build on other operating systems in combination with supported hardware. In order to force a build of a runtime system with SMP support, pass the --enable-smp-support command line argument to configure. Note, however, that it is not enough that it builds. The underlying thread library and operating system has to provide SMP support as well. If the thread library does not distribute scheduler threads over multiple processor cores then the runtime system will only seemingly provide SMP support. If the runtime system is not built by default on a specific platform, we have not tested it on that platform.

  NOTE: The design of SMP support for drivers is ongoing. There will probably be incompatible driver changes (only affecting drivers run on the runtime system with SMP support) released as patches for R11B.

  Potential incompatibility: Previously, specific driver call-backs were always called from the same thread. This is not true in the runtime system with SMP support. Calls to call-backs will be made from different threads, e.g., two consecutive calls to exactly the same call-back can be made from two different threads. This will in most cases not be a problem. All calls to call-backs are synchronized, i.e., only one call-back will be called at a time.

  In the future the default behavior will probably be the following: Calls to call-backs will, as now, be made from different threads. Calls to call-backs in the same driver instance will be synchronized. It will probably be possible to configure so that all calls to call-backs in all driver instances of a specific driver type will be synchronized. It may be possible to configure so that all calls to call-backs of a driver instance or a of a specific driver type will be made from the same thread.

  Parallelism in the Erlang code executed is a necessity for the Erlang runtime system to be able to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor hardware. There need to be at least as many Erlang processes runnable as processor cores for the Erlang runtime system to be able to take advantage of all processor cores.

  An Erlang runtime system with SMP support with only one Erlang process runnable all the time will almost always be slower than the same Erlang runtime system without SMP support. This is due to thread synchronization overhead.

  Known major bottleneck in the Erlang runtime system:

  • Currently the I/O system uses one "big lock", i.e. only one thread can do I/O at a time (with the exception of async threads and threads created by users own linked-in drivers). This is high on the list of things to optimize. Note, code that does not do I/O can be executed at the same time as one thread does I/O.

  Some pitfalls which might cause Erlang programs that work on the non-SMP runtime system to fail on the SMP runtime system:

  • A newly spawned process will often begin executing immediately. Code that expects that the parent process will be able to execute for a while before the child process begins executing is likely to fail.

  • High priority processes could previously provide mutual exclusion (bad programming style) by preventing normal and low priority processes from being run. High priority processes cannot be used this way to provide mutual exclusion.

  • erlang:yield() could be used to provide some kind of temporary mutual exclusion (also bad programming style). erlang:yield() cannot be used to provide any kind of mutual exclusion.

  • Obscure pitfall, only if a process being traced also sends normal messages to the tracer:
      The order between trace messages and normal messages is undefined. I.e. the order between normal messages sent from a tracee to a tracer and the trace messages generated from the same tracee to the same tracer is undefined. The internal order of normal messages and the internal order of trace messages will, of course, be preserved as before.

  The kernel poll feature is currently not supported by the runtime system with SMP support. It will probably be supported in a future release.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6006 Aux Id: OTP-6095

• Linked-in driver modifications.

  • Linked-in drivers must be recompiled.

  • The refc field in the ErlDrvBinary type has been removed. The reference count can be accessed via API functions. For more information see the erl_driver(1) man page.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-6095 Aux Id: OTP-6006

1.37  ERTS 5.4.13

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Large files (more than 2 GBytes) are now handled on Solaris 8.

  Own Id: OTP-5849 Aux Id: seq10157

• A failing bit syntax construction could fail with the PREVIOUS exception reason that had occurred in the process (instead of with badarg).

  Own Id: OTP-5911

• When building OTP, the Kernel application was built in both the primary and secondary bootstrap steps, which would cause problems if OTP including its bootstrap is checked into a version control system (such as CVS). (Thanks to Sebastian Strollo.)

  Own Id: OTP-5921

• binary_to_term(<<131,109,255,255,255,255) and similar expressions used to crash the emulator instead of causing a badarg exception. (Thanks to Matthias Lang.)

  Own Id: OTP-5933

• erlang:hibernate/3 could sometimes crash the emulator when no heap was needed.

  Own Id: OTP-5940

• Execution of match specs could under rare circumstances cause the emulator to dump core.

  Execution of match specs could cause memory leaks in the hybrid emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-5955

• A bug in erlang:trace_info/2 when getting info for a function in a deleted module resulting in an emulator crash, has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-5957

• Different (and old) config.guess files in the ERTS and Erl_Interface applications would cause build problems on the new Intel-based iMacs. (Thanks to Sebastion Strollo.)

  Own Id: OTP-5967

• pthread header and library mismatch on Linux systems (at least some SuSE and Debian) with both NPTL and Linuxthreads libraries installed.

  Own Id: OTP-5981

Improvements and New Features

• The driver_set_timer did not change the previous timeout if called a second time. Now it works as specified, changing the timeout.

  Own Id: OTP-5942

• The undocumented {packet,http} option (for the gen_tcp module) did not not work correctly when there were multiple continuation lines. (Thanks to Per Hedeland.)

  Own Id: OTP-5945

• The setuid_socket_wrap program was corrected to work for C compilers that treat the char type as unsigned. (Thanks to Magnus Henoch.)

  Own Id: OTP-5946

1.38  ERTS 5.4.12

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Fixed a minor build problem on Windows.

  Own Id: OTP-5819 Aux Id: OTP-5382 OTP-5540 OTP-5577

• The delay_send option for gen_tcp was broken on Windows.

  Own Id: OTP-5822

• If there were user-defined variables in the boot script, and their values were not provided using the -boot_var option, the emulator would refuse to start with a confusing error message. Corrected to show a clear, understandable message.

  The prim_file module was modified to not depend on the lists module, to make it possible to start the emulator using a user-defined loader. (Thanks to Martin Bjorklund.)

  Own Id: OTP-5828 Aux Id: seq10151

Improvements and New Features

• The HiPE compiler identifies more leaf functions, giving slightly faster code.

  Corrected problems in HiPE's coalescing register allocating that would cause it to fail when compiling very large functions (e.g. some of parse modules in the Megaco application).

  Own Id: OTP-5853

1.39  ERTS 5.4.11

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Timers could sometimes timeout too early. This bug has now been fixed.

  Automatic cancellation of timers created by erlang:send_after(Time,pid(),Msg) and erlang:start_timer(Time,pid(),Msg) has been introduced. Timers created with the receiver specified by a pid, will automatically be cancelled when the receiver exits. For more information see the erlang(3) man page.

  In order to be able to maintain a larger amount of timers without increasing the maintenance cost, the internal timer wheel and bif timer table have been enlarged.

  Also a number of minor bif timer optimizations have been implemented.

  Own Id: OTP-5795 Aux Id: OTP-5090, seq8913, seq10139, OTP-5782

• erlang:monitor(process,Pid) hanged if Pid referred to a process on a non-existing node with the same nodename as the nodename of node on which the call was made. This bug has now been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5827

Improvements and New Features

• By setting Unix environment variables, the priority for the emulator can be lowered when it is writing crash dumps and the time allowed for finishing writing a crash dump can be set to a certain number of seconds. See the documentation for erl in the ERTS application. (Also, a few other previously undocumented environment variables are now documented.)

  Own Id: OTP-5818

• Documentation improvements:

  - documentation for erlang:link/1 corrected

  - command line flag -code_path_cache added

  - erl command line flags clarifications

  - net_kernel(3) clarifications

  Own Id: OTP-5847

1.40  ERTS 5.4.10

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• -D_GNU_SOURCE is now always passed on the compile command line on linux. This in order to ensure that all included system headers see _GNU_SOURCE defined.

  _GNU_SOURCE is now also defined on linux in configure when looking for features.

  Some minor (harmless) configure bugs were also fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5749

• Some compiler warnings and Dialyzer warnings were eliminated in the Tools application.

  When tracing to a port (which fprof does), there could be fake schedule out/schedule in messages sent for a process that had exited.

  Own Id: OTP-5757

Improvements and New Features

• The BIFs iolist_size/1 and iolist_to_binary/1 has been added.

  The BIF list_to_existing_atom/1 has been added.

  Minor bug fix: The exception reason could be changed to error inside nested try/catch constructs if the erlang:raise/3 BIF was called with an empty stacktrace. (Calling erlang:raise/3 with an empty stacktrace is NOT recommended.)

  Minor bugfix: On Windows, file:open/2 will now return the documented error reason {error,eisdir} if the filename refers to a directory (it used to return {error,eacces}).

  The message in the documentation for erlang:system_monitor/2, description of busy_dist_port, was corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-5709 Aux Id: seq10100

• The previously undocumented and UNSUPPORTED zlib module has been updated in an incompatible way and many bugs have been corrected. It is now also documented.

  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

  Own Id: OTP-5715

• New socket options priority and tos for platforms that support them (currently only Linux).

  Own Id: OTP-5756

• Only the emulator is now linked with termcap library in order to decrease library dependencies for other otp programs.

  Own Id: OTP-5758

1.41  ERTS 5.4.9.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The native resolver has gotten an control API for extended debugging and soft restart. It is: inet_gethost_native:control(Control)
  Control = {debug_level,Level} | soft_restart
  Level = integer() in the range 0-4.

  Own Id: OTP-5751 Aux Id: EABln25013

1.42  ERTS 5.4.9.1

Improvements and New Features

• On VxWorks, epmd did not handle file descriptors with higher numbers than 63. Also, if epmd should get a file descriptor with a number >= FD_SETSIZE, it will close a the file descriptor and write a message to the log (instead of mysteriously fail); the Erlang node that tried to register will fail with a duplicate_name error (unfortunately, epmd has no way to indicate to the Erlang node why the register attempt failed).

  Own Id: OTP-5716 Aux Id: seq10070

1.43  ERTS 5.4.9

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Timezone data is now initialized better. (was a problem at least on NetBSD 2.0.2) Thanks to Rich Neswold.

  Own Id: OTP-5621

• The hybrid-heap emulator ('erl -hybrid') is much more stable. We have corrected all known bugs that caused it to dump core while running our test suites.

  Own Id: OTP-5634

• Fixed rare memory leaks in erlang:demonitor/1 when distributed monitors were removed.

  Own Id: OTP-5692

• Processes were sometimes unnecessarily garbage collected when terminating. These unnecessary garbage collections have now been eliminated.

  Own Id: OTP-5693

Improvements and New Features

• The c:i/0 function will now run in a paged mode if there are more than 100 processes in the system. (Thanks to Ulf Wiger.)

  erlang:system_info(process_count) has been optimized and does now return exactly the same value as length(processes()). Previously erlang:system_info(process_count) did not include exiting processes which are included in length(processes()).

  The +P flag for erl, which sets the maximum number of processes allowed to exist at the same, no longer accepts values higher than 134217727. (You will still probably run out of memory before you'll be able to reach that limit.)

  Own Id: OTP-5645 Aux Id: seq9984

• The term-building driver functions driver_output_term() and driver_send_term() have been updated:

  The ERL_DRV_FLOAT type has been added.

  For the ERL_DRV_BINARY type, the length and offset are now validated against the length of the driver binary.

  The ERL_DRV_PID type is now implemented (it was documented, but not implemented).

  Own Id: OTP-5674

1.44  ERTS 5.4.8

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• ets:delete/1 now allows other Erlang process to run when a large table is being deleted.

  Own Id: OTP-5572

• A bug regarding tcp sockets which results in hanging gen_tcp:send/2 has been corrected. To encounter this bug you needed one process that read from a socket, one that wrote more date than the reader read out so the sender got suspended, and then the reader closed the socket. (Reported and diagnosed by Alexey Shchepin.)

  Corrected a bug in the (undocumented and unsupported) option {packet,http} for gen_tcp. (Thanks to Claes Wikstrom and Luke Gorrie.)

  Updated the documentation regarding the second argument to gen_tcp:recv/2, the Length to receive.

  Own Id: OTP-5582 Aux Id: seq9839

• Erlang/OTP will now build on Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" (the problem was that 10.4 has a partially implemented poll() function that can't handle devices). Also, on Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", Erlang/OTP will now use select() instead of poll() (because poll() on Mac OS X 10.3 is implemented using select()).

  Own Id: OTP-5595

• A bug in the file driver when opening a file in compressed mode, and the returned allocated pointer from the compressing library was in very high memory (>= 2GB), causing e.g. file:read/2 to return {error,ebadf}, has been corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-5618

Improvements and New Features

• The new fun M:F/A construct creates a fun that refers to the latest version of M:F/A. This syntax is meant to replace tuple funs {M,F} which have many problems.

  The new type test is_function(Fun,A) (which may be used in guards) test whether Fun is a fun that can be applied with A arguments. (Currently, Fun can also be a tuple fun.)

  Own Id: OTP-5584

• In the HiPE application, there's a new experimental register allocator (optimistic coalescing), and the linear scan register allocator is now also available on ppc. Plus lots of cleanups.

  Minor hybrid heap corrections.

  The maximum size of a heap used to be artificially limited so that the size of a heap would fit in 28 bits; that limitation could cause the emulator to terminate in a garbage collection even if there still was available memory. Now the largest heap size for a 32 bit CPU is 1,699,221,830 bytes. (Thanks to Jesper Wilhelmsson.)

  Also removed the undocumented +H emulator option.

  Own Id: OTP-5596

1.45  ERTS 5.4.7

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• to_erl could close unexpectedly on Linux systems. Also, output from the emulator could be lost. Corrected.

  Own Id: OTP-5561

Improvements and New Features

• The cpu_timestamp option for erlang:trace/3 is now also supported on Linux.

  Own Id: OTP-5532 Aux Id: seq9813

• The last known werl window size/position is now saved correctly when werl is stopped with the window minimized. A problem with the placement not being saved if the emulator is halted or stopped from the JCL menu has also been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5544 Aux Id: OTP-5522

1.46  ERTS 5.4.6

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Some math libraries do not always throw floating-point exceptions on errors. In order to be able to use these libraries, floating-point errors are now more thoroughly checked.

  Misc floating-point fixes for Linux and MacOSX.

  Own Id: OTP-5467

• An internal buffer was sometimes not cleared which caused garbage to appear in error messages sent to the error logger.

  errno was sometimes clobbered which caused erroneous error reports about poll() errors.

  Only emulators on unix platforms were affected by these bugs.

  Own Id: OTP-5492

• The ethread library now works on OpenBSD.

  Own Id: OTP-5515

• Corrected a bug in the (undocumented and unsupported) option {packet,http} for gen_tcp. (Thanks to Claes Wikstrom and Luke Gorrie.)

  Own Id: OTP-5519

Improvements and New Features

• binary_to_term/1 could cause the emulator to crash when given invalid pids or funs.

  Own Id: OTP-5484 Aux Id: seq9801

• Some more stability problems were fixed in the hybrid-heap emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-5489

• After werl was closed with the window minimized, it was not possible to restart werl with an open window. A temporary solution has so far been implemented that restores the initial window settings every time werl is started.

  Own Id: OTP-5522

1.47  ERTS 5.4.5

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• If a process had node links (created by monitor_node/2), executing process_info(Pid,memory) for that process would crash the emulator.

  Own Id: OTP-5420

• Minor corrections to the help text printed by erlc -help. The documentation for erlc was also slightly updated.

  Own Id: OTP-5428

• 32-bit words were used for offsets in the garbage collector. This caused the emulator to crash on 64-bit machines when heaps were moved more than 4 GB during garbage collection.

  Own Id: OTP-5430

• is_boolean(42.5) failed to load if optimization was explicitly turned off.

  Own Id: OTP-5448

• If there was a call to Module:foo/X from any loaded module, the returned by M:module_info(exports) would always include {foo,X} (even though Module:foo/X if was not defined).

  Own Id: OTP-5450 Aux Id: seq9722

Improvements and New Features

• The c option for the +B flag has been introduced which makes it possible to use Ctrl-C (Ctrl-Break on Windows) to interrupt the shell process rather than to invoke the emulator break handler. All new +B options are also supported on Windows (werl) as of now. Furthermore, Ctrl-C on Windows has now been reserved for copying text (what Ctrl-Ins was used for previously). Ctrl-Break should be used for break handling. Lastly, the documentation of the system flags has been updated.

  Own Id: OTP-5388

1.48  ERTS 5.4.4

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The function erlang:float/1 can now be used in match specifications and is recognized by dbg:fun2ms/1 and ets:fun2ms/1. This addition is part of the work to "harmonize" match specification guards with Erlang guards.

  Own Id: OTP-5297 Aux Id: OTP-4927

• The register/2 BIF would return true even if the second argument was not a pid for living process. Corrected to cause an exception.

  Own Id: OTP-5324 Aux Id: seq9698

• In the 'bag' type of ets tables, elements having the same key were supposed to be order in insertion order. The would be wrong if a rehash occurred.

  Own Id: OTP-5340 Aux Id: seq9704

• Linked in drivers in the Crypto and Asn1 applications are now compiled with the -D_THREAD_SAFE and -D_REENTRANT switches on unix when the emulator has thread support enabled.

  Linked in drivers on MacOSX are not compiled with the undocumented -lbundle1.o switch anymore. Thanks to Sean Hinde who sent us a patch.

  Linked in driver in Crypto, and port programs in SSL, now compiles on OSF1.

  Minor makefile improvements in Runtime_Tools.

  Own Id: OTP-5346

• Fixed a bug in the hybrid heap in distributed send operations.

  Own Id: OTP-5361

• A BIF erlang:raise/3 has been added. See the manual for details. It is intended for internal system programming only, advanced error handling.

  Own Id: OTP-5376 Aux Id: OTP-5257

• Mikael Pettersson (HiPE) corrected a few bugs in the emulator that caused problems when compiled with the experimental gcc-4.0.0.

  Own Id: OTP-5386

Improvements and New Features

• Minor update of the internal documentation of the epmd protocol.

  The listen port of epmd has now been registered at IANA: http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers.

  Own Id: OTP-5234

• run_erl.c now works on Mac OS X and FreeBSD.

  Own Id: OTP-5384

• A few bugs were corrected in the HiPE application.

  Own Id: OTP-5385

1.49  ERTS 5.4.3

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• Font and color preferences for werl.exe now can be saved even after the first time you run werl.exe. The window position and size is also saved. Patch from James Hague who did all the hard work.

  Own Id: OTP-5250

• OTP archive libraries, e.g. the erl_interface library, on MacOSX could not be used without first rerunning ranlib on them. This bug has now been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5274

• Bugs in erlang:hash/2 and erlang:phash/2 on 64-bit platforms have been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5292

Improvements and New Features

• Corrected a crash in the 64-bits emulator.

  Corrected a problem in the hybrid heap emulator.

  In the chapter about the abstract format in the ERTS User's Guide, updated the last section about how the abstract format is stored in BEAM files.

  Own Id: OTP-5262

• The maximum number of concurrent threads in the internal ethread thread package has been limited to 2048.

  Own Id: OTP-5280

1.50  ERTS 5.4.2.1

Improvements and New Features

• If Erlang/OTP was installed in a short directory name, such as C:\\Program\\erl5.4.2, the emulator would not start.

  Own Id: OTP-5254

1.51  ERTS 5.4.2

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• If one used select/3 and select/1 on a non-fixed ETS table and deleted objects simultaneously, the emulator could crash. Note that the result of such simultaneous operations on tables that are not in a fixed state is still undefined, but the emulator crash is, needless to say, fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5209 Aux Id: seq9198

• Arithmetic with big numbers could crash the emulator.

  The HiPE native code compiler and run-time code in the emulator has been updated. (Note: Native code is still not supported.)

  Eliminated a few bugs that could crash the hybrid emulator (which is not supported).

  Own Id: OTP-5233 Aux Id: seq9587

1.52  ERTS 5.4.1

Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

• The ethread library was unnecessarily rebuilt multiple times during the build process, also a debug version of the library was build during the install phase. These unnecessary builds have now been removed. Note, the content of the installed Erlang/OTP system is not effected at all by this change.

  Own Id: OTP-5203

• The emulator could fail to clear the memory segment cache. This could potentially cause memory allocation to unnecessarily fail when memory usage was close to its maximum. This bug has now been fixed.

  Own Id: OTP-5211

• std_alloc (std short for standard) was sometimes called def_alloc (def short for default). std_alloc is now everywhere referred to as std_alloc.

  Own Id: OTP-5216

• A documentation bug has been corrected in the erts_alloc(3) documentation. It was stated that some of the memory allocators present were by default disabled. This is true for Erlang/OTP R9C, but is not true for Erlang/OTP R10B. In R10B all memory allocators present are enabled by default.

  Own Id: OTP-5217

Improvements and New Features

• The emulator now close all open files and sockets immediately after receiving an USR1 signal. This causes the emulator to unregister at epmd as early as possible.

  Own Id: OTP-5221 Aux Id: OTP-4985, seq9514

• Try/catch support in the emulator slightly updated.

  Own Id: OTP-5229