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as the outcome of Austin Group tracker issue #62, future editions of
POSIX have dropped the requirement that fork be AS-safe. this allows
but does not require implementations to synchronize fork with internal
locks and give forked children of multithreaded parents a partly or
fully unrestricted execution environment where they can continue to
use the standard library (per POSIX, they can only portably use
AS-safe functions).
up until recently, taking this allowance did not seem desirable.
however, commit 8ed2bd8bfcb4ea6448afb55a941f4b5b2b0398c0 exposed the
extent to which applications and libraries are depending on the
ability to use malloc and other non-AS-safe interfaces in MT-forked
children, by converting latent very-low-probability catastrophic state
corruption into predictable deadlock. dealing with the fallout has
been a huge burden for users/distros.
while it looks like most of the non-portable usage in applications
could be fixed given sufficient effort, at least some of it seems to
occur in language runtimes which are exposing the ability to run
unrestricted code in the child as part of the contract with the
programmer. any attempt at fixing such contracts is not just a
technical problem but a social one, and is probably not tractable.
this patch extends the fork function to take locks for all libc
singletons in the parent, and release or reset those locks in the
child, so that when the underlying fork operation takes place, the
state protected by these locks is consistent and ready for the child
to use. locking is skipped in the case where the parent is
single-threaded so as not to interfere with legacy AS-safety property
of fork in single-threaded programs. lock order is mostly arbitrary,
but the malloc locks (including bump allocator in case it's used) must
be taken after the locks on any subsystems that might use malloc, and
non-AS-safe locks cannot be taken while the thread list lock is held,
imposing a requirement that it be taken last.
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this change lifts undocumented restrictions on calls by replacement
mallocs to libc functions that might take these locks, and sets the
stage for lifting restrictions on the child execution environment
after multithreaded fork.
care is taken to #define macros to replace all four functions (malloc,
calloc, realloc, free) even if not all of them will be used, using an
undefined symbol name for the ones intended not to be used so that any
inadvertent future use will be caught at compile time rather than
directed to the wrong implementation.
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thread-local buffers allocated for dlerror need to be queued for free
at a later time when the owning thread exits, since malloc may be
replaced by application code and the exiting context is not valid to
call application code from. the code to process queue of pending
frees, introduced in commit aa5a9d15e09851f7b4a1668e9dbde0f6234abada,
gratuitously held the lock for the entire duration of queue
processing, updating the global queue pointer after each free, despite
there being no logical requirement that all frees finish before
another thread can access the queue.
instead, immediately claim the whole queue for freeing and release the
lock, then walk the list and perform frees without the lock held. the
change is unlikely to make any meaningful difference to performance,
but it eliminates one point where the allocator is called under an
internal lock. since the allocator may be application-provided, such
calls are undesirable because they allow application code to impede
forward progress of libc functions in other threads arbitrarily long,
and to induce deadlock if it calls a libc function that requires the
same lock.
the change also eliminates a lock ordering consideration that's an
impediment upcoming work with multithreaded fork.
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__dl_thread_cleanup is called from the context of an exiting thread
that is not in a consistent state valid for calling application code.
since commit c9f415d7ea2dace5bf77f6518b6afc36bb7a5732, it's possible
(and supported usage) for the allocator to have been replaced by the
application, so __dl_thread_cleanup can no longer call free. instead,
reuse the message buffer as a linked-list pointer, and queue it to be
freed the next time any dynamic linker error message is generated.
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libc.h was intended to be a header for access to global libc state and
related interfaces, but ended up included all over the place because
it was the way to get the weak_alias macro. most of the inclusions
removed here are places where weak_alias was needed. a few were
recently introduced for hidden. some go all the way back to when
libc.h defined CANCELPT_BEGIN and _END, and all (wrongly implemented)
cancellation points had to include it.
remaining spurious users are mostly callers of the LOCK/UNLOCK macros
and files that use the LFS64 macro to define the awful *64 aliases.
in a few places, new inclusion of libc.h is added because several
internal headers no longer implicitly include libc.h.
declarations for __lockfile and __unlockfile are moved from libc.h to
stdio_impl.h so that the latter does not need libc.h. putting them in
libc.h made no sense at all, since the macros in stdio_impl.h are
needed to use them correctly anyway.
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this cleans up what had become widespread direct inline use of "GNU C"
style attributes directly in the source, and lowers the barrier to
increased use of hidden visibility, which will be useful to recovering
some of the efficiency lost when the protected visibility hack was
dropped in commit dc2f368e565c37728b0d620380b849c3a1ddd78f, especially
on archs where the PLT ABI is costly.
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the ultimate goal of this change is to get all code used in libc.a out
of dynlink.c, so that the dynamic linker code can be moved to its own
tree and object files in the src tree can all be shared between libc.a
and libc.so.
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