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this issue mainly affects PIE binaries and execution of programs via
direct invocation of the dynamic linker binary: depending on kernel
behavior, in these cases the initial brk may be placed at at location
where it cannot be extended, due to conflicting adjacent maps.
when brk fails, mmap is used instead to expand the heap. in order to
avoid expensive bookkeeping for managing fragmentation by merging
these new heap regions, the minimum size for new heap regions
increases exponentially in the number of regions. this limits the
number of regions, and thereby the number of fixed fragmentation
points, to a quantity which is logarithmic with respect to the size of
virtual address space and thus negligible. the exponential growth is
tuned so as to avoid expanding the heap by more than approximately 50%
of its current total size.
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there is no reason to check the return value for setting errno, since
brk never returns errors, only the new value of the brk (which may be
the same as the old, or otherwise differ from the requested brk, on
failure).
it may be beneficial to eventually just eliminate this file and make
the syscalls inline in malloc.c.
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I wrongly assumed the brk syscall would set errno, but on failure it
returns the old value of the brk rather than an error code.
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if a multithreaded program became non-multithreaded (i.e. all other
threads exited) while one thread held an internal lock, the remaining
thread would fail to release the lock. the the program then became
multithreaded again at a later time, any further attempts to obtain
the lock would deadlock permanently.
the underlying cause is that the value of libc.threads_minus_1 at
unlock time might not match the value at lock time. one solution would
be returning a flag to the caller indicating whether the lock was
taken and needs to be unlocked, but there is a simpler solution: using
the lock itself as such a flag.
note that this flag is not needed anyway for correctness; if the lock
is not held, the unlock code is harmless. however, the memory
synchronization properties associated with a_store are costly on some
archs, so it's best to avoid executing the unlock code when it is
unnecessary.
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the case where mem was already aligned is handled earlier in the
function now.
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this bug was caught by the new footer-corruption check in realloc and
free.
if the block returned by malloc was already aligned to the desired
alignment, memalign's logic to split off the misaligned head was
incorrect; rather than writing to a point inside the allocated block,
it was overwriting the footer of the previous block on the heap with
the value 1 (length 0 plus an in-use flag).
fortunately, the impact of this bug was fairly low. (this is probably
why it was not caught sooner.) due to the way the heap works, malloc
will never return a block whose previous block is free. (doing so would
be harmful because it would increase fragmentation with no benefit.)
the footer is actually not needed for in-use blocks, except that its
in-use bit needs to remain set so that it does not get merged with
free blocks, so there was no harm in it being set to 1 instead of the
correct value.
however, there is one case where this bug could have had an impact: in
multi-threaded programs, if another thread freed the previous block
after memalign's call to malloc returned, but before memalign
overwrote the previous block's footer, the resulting block in the free
list could be left in a corrupt state. I have not analyzed the impact
of this bad state and whether it could lead to more serious
malfunction.
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the sizes in the header and footer for a chunk should always match. if
they don't, the program has definitely invoked undefined behavior, and
the most likely cause is a simple overflow, either of a buffer in the
block being freed or the one just below it.
crashing here should not only improve security of buggy programs, but
also aid in debugging, since the crash happens in a context where you
have a pointer to the likely-overflowed buffer.
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there are two motivations for this change. one is to avoid
gratuitously depending on a C11 symbol for implementing a POSIX
function. the other pertains to the documented semantics. C11 does not
define any behavior for aligned_alloc when the length argument is not
a multiple of the alignment argument. posix_memalign on the other hand
places no requirements on the length argument. using __memalign as the
implementation of both, rather than trying to implement one in terms
of the other when their documented contracts differ, eliminates this
confusion.
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C11 has no requirement that the alignment be a multiple of
sizeof(void*), and in fact seems to require any "valid alignment
supported by the implementation" to work. since the alignment of char
is 1 and thus a valid alignment, an alignment argument of 1 should be
accepted.
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this change fixes an obscure issue with some nonstandard kernels,
where the initial brk syscall returns a pointer just past the end of
bss rather than the beginning of a new page. in that case, the dynamic
linker has already reclaimed the space between the end of bss and the
page end for use by malloc, and memory corruption (allocating the same
memory twice) will occur when malloc again claims it on the first call
to brk.
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in case of mmap-obtained chunks, end points past the end of the
mapping and reading it may fault. since the value is not needed until
after the conditional, move the access to prevent invalid reads.
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with this patch, the malloc in libc.so built with -Os is nearly the
same speed as the one built with -O3. thus it solves the performance
regression that resulted from removing the forced -O3 when building
libc.so; now libc.so can be both small and fast.
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based on Gregor's patch sent to the list. includes:
- stdalign.h
- removing gets in C11 mode
- adding aligned_alloc and adjusting other functions to use it
- adding 'x' flag to fopen for exclusive mode
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i did some testing trying to switch malloc to use the new internal
lock with priority inheritance, and my malloc contention test got
20-100 times slower. if priority inheritance futexes are this slow,
it's simply too high a price to pay for avoiding priority inversion.
maybe we can consider them somewhere down the road once the kernel
folks get their act together on this (and perferably don't link it to
glibc's inefficient lock API)...
as such, i've switch __lock to use malloc's implementation of
lightweight locks, and updated all the users of the code to use an
array with a waiter count for their locks. this should give optimal
performance in the vast majority of cases, and it's simple.
malloc is still using its own internal copy of the lock code because
it seems to yield measurably better performance with -O3 when it's
inlined (20% or more difference in the contention stress test).
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CHUNK_SIZE macro was defined incorrectly and shaving off at least one
significant bit in the size of mmapped chunks, resulting in the test
for oldlen==newlen always failing and incurring a syscall. fortunately
i don't think this issue caused any other observable behavior; the
definition worked correctly for all non-mmapped chunks where its
correctness matters more, since their lengths are always multiples of
the alignment.
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gcc generates extremely bad code (7 byte immediate mov) for the old
null pointer write approach. it should be generating something like
"xor %eax,%eax ; mov %al,(%eax)". in any case, using a dedicated
crashing opcode accomplishes the same thing in one byte.
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a valid mmapped block will have an even (actually aligned) "extra"
field, whereas a freed chunk on the heap will always have an in-use
neighbor.
this fixes a potential bug if mmap ever allocated memory below the
main program/brk (in which case it would be wrongly-detected as a
double-free by the old code) and allows the double-free check to work
for donated memory outside of the brk area (or, in the future,
secondary heap zones if support for their creation is added).
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even if size_t was 32-bit already, the fact that the value was
unsigned and that gcc is too stupid to figure out it would be positive
as a signed quantity (due to the immediately-prior arithmetic and
conditionals) results in gcc compiling the integer-to-float conversion
as zero extension to 64 bits followed by an "fildll" (64 bit)
instruction rather than a simple "fildl" (32 bit) instruction on x86.
reportedly fildll is very slow on certain p4-class machines; even if
not, the new code is slightly smaller.
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the bug appeared only with requests roughly 2*sizeof(size_t) to
4*sizeof(size_t) bytes smaller than a multiple of the page size, and
only for requests large enough to be serviced by mmap instead of the
normal heap. it was only ever observed on 64-bit machines but
presumably could also affect 32-bit (albeit with a smaller window of
opportunity).
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if init_malloc returns positive (successful first init), malloc will
retry getting a chunk from the free bins rather than expanding the
heap again. also pass init_malloc a hint for the size of the initial
allocation.
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why does this affect behavior? well, the linker seems to traverse
archive files starting from its current position when resolving
symbols. since calloc.c comes alphabetically (and thus in sequence in
the archive file) between __simple_malloc.c and malloc.c, attempts to
resolve the "malloc" symbol for use by calloc.c were pulling in the
full malloc.c implementation rather than the __simple_malloc.c
implementation.
as of now, lite_malloc.c and malloc.c are adjacent in the archive and
in the correct order, so malloc.c should never be used to resolve
"malloc" unless it's already needed to resolve another symbol ("free"
or "realloc").
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this change is made with some reluctance, but i think it's for the
best. correct programs must handle either behavior, so there is little
advantage to having malloc(0) return NULL. and i managed to actually
make the malloc code slightly smaller with this change.
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do not allow allocations that overflow ptrdiff_t; fix some overflow
checks that were not quite right but didn't matter due to address
layout implementation.
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