When the malloc subsystem detects some kind of memory corruption,
depending on the configuration it prints the error, a backtrace, a
memory map and then aborts the process. In this process, the
backtrace() call may result in a call to malloc, resulting in
various kinds of problematic behavior.
In one case, the malloc it calls may detect a corruption and call
backtrace again, and a stack overflow may result due to the infinite
recursion. In another case, the malloc it calls may deadlock on an
arena lock with the malloc (or free, realloc, etc.) that detected the
corruption. In yet another case, if the program is linked with
pthreads, backtrace may do a pthread_once initialization, which
deadlocks on itself.
In all these cases, the program exit is not as intended. This is
avoidable by marking the arena that malloc detected a corruption on,
as unusable. The following patch does that. Features of this patch
are as follows:
- A flag is added to the mstate struct of the arena to indicate if the
arena is corrupt.
- The flag is checked whenever malloc functions try to get a lock on
an arena. If the arena is unusable, a NULL is returned, causing the
malloc to use mmap or try the next arena.
- malloc_printerr sets the corrupt flag on the arena when it detects a
corruption
- free does not concern itself with the flag at all. It is not
important since the backtrace workflow does not need free. A free
in a parallel thread may cause another corruption, but that's not
new
- The flag check and set are not atomic and may race. This is fine
since we don't care about contention during the flag check. We want
to make sure that the malloc call in the backtrace does not trip on
itself and all that action happens in the same thread and not across
threads.
I verified that the test case does not show any regressions due to
this patch. I also ran the malloc benchmarks and found an
insignificant difference in timings (< 2%).
* malloc/Makefile (tests): New test case tst-malloc-backtrace.
* malloc/arena.c (arena_lock): Check if arena is corrupt.
(reused_arena): Find a non-corrupt arena.
(heap_trim): Pass arena to unlink.
* malloc/hooks.c (malloc_check_get_size): Pass arena to
malloc_printerr.
(top_check): Likewise.
(free_check): Likewise.
(realloc_check): Likewise.
* malloc/malloc.c (malloc_printerr): Add arena argument.
(unlink): Likewise.
(munmap_chunk): Adjust.
(ARENA_CORRUPTION_BIT): New macro.
(arena_is_corrupt): Likewise.
(set_arena_corrupt): Likewise.
(sysmalloc): Use mmap if there are no usable arenas.
(_int_malloc): Likewise.
(__libc_malloc): Don't fail if arena_get returns NULL.
(_mid_memalign): Likewise.
(__libc_calloc): Likewise.
(__libc_realloc): Adjust for additional argument to
malloc_printerr.
(_int_free): Likewise.
(malloc_consolidate): Likewise.
(_int_realloc): Likewise.
(_int_memalign): Don't touch corrupt arenas.
* malloc/tst-malloc-backtrace.c: New test case.
