|
allowing the application to replace malloc (since commit
c9f415d7ea2dace5bf77f6518b6afc36bb7a5732) has brought multiple
headaches where it's used from various critical sections in libc
components. for example:
- the thread-local message buffers allocated for dlerror can't be
freed at thread exit time because application code would then run in
the context of a non-existant thread. this was handled in commit
aa5a9d15e09851f7b4a1668e9dbde0f6234abada by queuing them for free
later.
- the dynamic linker has to be careful not to pass memory allocated at
early startup time (necessarily using its own malloc) to realloc or
free after redoing relocations with the application and all
libraries present. bugs in this area were fixed several times, at
least in commits 0c5c8f5da6e36fe4ab704bee0cd981837859e23f and
2f1f51ae7b2d78247568e7fdb8462f3c19e469a4 and possibly others.
- by calling the allocator from contexts where libc-internal locks are
held, we impose undocumented requirements on alternate malloc
implementations not to call into any libc function that might
attempt to take these locks; if they do, deadlock results.
- work to make fork of a multithreaded parent give the child an
unrestricted execution environment is blocked by lock order issues
as long as the application-provided allocator can be called with
libc-internal locks held.
these problems are all fixed by giving libc internals access to the
original, non-replaced allocator, for use where needed. it can't be
used everywhere, as some interfaces like str[n]dup, open_[w]memstream,
getline/getdelim, etc. are required to provide the called memory
obtained as if by (the public) malloc. and there are a number of libc
interfaces that are "pure library" code, not part of some internal
singleton, and where using the application's choice of malloc
implementation is preferable -- things like glob, regex, etc.
one might expect there to be significant cost to static-linked
programs, pulling in two malloc implementations, one of them
mostly-unused, if malloc is replaced. however, in almost all of the
places where malloc is used internally, care has been taken already
not to pull in realloc/free (i.e. to link with just the bump
allocator). this size optimization carries over automatically.
the newly-exposed internal allocator functions are obtained by
renaming the actual definitions, then adding new wrappers around them
with the public names. technically __libc_realloc and __libc_free
could be aliases rather than needing a layer of wrapper, but this
would almost surely break certain instrumentation (valgrind) and the
size and performance difference is negligible. __libc_calloc needs to
be handled specially since calloc is designed to work with either the
internal or the replaced malloc.
as a bonus, this change also eliminates the longstanding ugly
dependency of the static bump allocator on order of object files in
libc.a, by making it so there's only one definition of the malloc
function and having it in the same source file as the bump allocator.
|
|
the files added come from the mallocng development repo, commit
2ed58817cca5bc055974e5a0e43c280d106e696b. they comprise a new malloc
implementation, developed over the past 9 months, to replace the old
allocator (since dubbed "oldmalloc") with one that retains low code
size and minimal baseline memory overhead while avoiding fundamental
flaws in oldmalloc and making significant enhancements. these include
highly controlled fragmentation, fine-grained ability to return memory
to the system when freed, and strong hardening against dynamic memory
usage errors by the caller.
internally, mallocng derives most of these properties from tightly
structuring memory, creating space for allocations as uniform-sized
slots within individually mmapped (and individually freeable)
allocation groups. smaller-than-pagesize groups are created within
slots of larger ones. minimal group size is very small, and larger
sizes (in geometric progression) only come into play when usage is
high.
all data necessary for maintaining consistency of the allocator state
is tracked in out-of-band metadata, reachable via a validated path
from minimal in-band metadata. all pointers passed (to free, etc.) are
validated before any stores to memory take place. early reuse of freed
slots is avoided via approximate LRU order of freed slots. further
hardening against use-after-free and double-free, even in the case
where the freed slot has been reused, is made by cycling the offset
within the slot at which the allocation is placed; this is possible
whenever the slot size is larger than the requested allocation.
|
