i386, x86_64, x32, and powerpc all use TLS for stack protector canary
values in the default stack protector ABI, but the location only
matched the ABI on i386 and x86_64. on x32, the expected location for
the canary contained the tid, thus producing spurious mismatches
(resulting in process termination) upon fork. on powerpc, the expected
location contained the stdio_locks list head, so returning from a
function after calling flockfile produced spurious mismatches. in both
cases, the random canary was not present, and a predictable value was
used instead, making the stack protector hardening much less effective
than it should be.
in the current fix, the thread structure has been expanded to have
canary fields at all three possible locations, and archs that use a
non-default location must define a macro in pthread_arch.h to choose
which location is used. for most archs (which lack TLS canary ABI) the
choice does not matter.
both static and dynamic linked versions of the __copy_tls function
have a hidden assumption that the alignment of the beginning or end of
the memory passed is suitable for storing an array of pointers for the
dtv. pthread_create satisfies this requirement except when
libc.tls_size is misaligned, which cannot happen with dynamic linking
due to way update_tls_size computes the total size, but could happen
with static linking and odd-sized TLS.
commit dab441aea2, which made thread
pointer init mandatory for all programs, rendered this store obsolete
by removing the early-return path for static programs with no TLS.
this slightly reduces the code size cost of TLS/thread-pointer for
static linking since __init_tp can be inlined into its only caller and
removed. this is analogous to the handling of __init_libc in
__libc_start_main, where the function only has external linkage when
it needs to be called from the dynamic linker.
this was already essentially possible as a result of the previous
commits changing the dynamic linker/thread pointer bootstrap process.
this commit mainly adds build system infrastructure:
configure no longer attempts to disable stack protector. instead it
simply determines how so the makefile can disable stack protector for
a few translation units used during early startup.
stack protector is also disabled for memcpy and memset since compilers
(incorrectly) generate calls to them on some archs to implement
struct initialization and assignment, and such calls may creep into
early initialization.
no explicit attempt to enable stack protector is made by configure at
this time; any stack protector option supported by the compiler can be
passed to configure in CFLAGS, and if the compiler uses stack
protector by default, this default is respected.
since 1.1.0, musl has nominally required a thread pointer to be setup.
most of the remaining code that was checking for its availability was
doing so for the sake of being usable by the dynamic linker. as of
commit 71f099cb7d, this is no longer
necessary; the thread pointer is now valid before any libc code
(outside of dynamic linker bootstrap functions) runs.
this commit essentially concludes "phase 3" of the "transition path
for removing lazy init of thread pointer" project that began during
the 1.1.0 release cycle.
as a result of commit 12e1e32468, kernel
processing of the robust list is only needed for process-shared
mutexes. previously the first attempt to lock any owner-tracked mutex
resulted in robust list initialization and a set_robust_list syscall.
this is no longer necessary, and since the kernel's record of the
robust list must now be cleared at thread exit time for detached
threads, optimizing it out is more worthwhile than before too.
There are two main abi variants for thread local storage layout:
(1) TLS is above the thread pointer at a fixed offset and the pthread
struct is below that. So the end of the struct is at known offset.
(2) the thread pointer points to the pthread struct and TLS starts
below it. So the start of the struct is at known (zero) offset.
Assembly code for the dynamic TLSDESC callback needs to access the
dynamic thread vector (dtv) pointer which is currently at the front
of the pthread struct. So in case of (1) the asm code needs to hard
code the offset from the end of the struct which can easily break if
the struct changes.
This commit adds a copy of the dtv at the end of the struct. New members
must not be added after dtv_copy, only before it. The size of the struct
is increased a bit, but there is opportunity for size optimizations.
a conservative estimate of 4*sizeof(size_t) was used as the minimum
alignment for thread-local storage, despite the only requirements
being alignment suitable for struct pthread and void* (which struct
pthread already contains). additional alignment required by the
application or libraries is encoded in their headers and is already
applied.
over-alignment prevented the builtin_tls array from ever being used in
dynamic-linked programs on 64-bit archs, thereby requiring allocation
at startup even in programs with no TLS of their own.
the main motivation for this change is to remove the assumption that
the tid of the main thread is also the pid of the process. (the value
returned by the set_tid_address syscall was used to fill both fields
despite it semantically being the tid.) this is historically and
presently true on linux and unlikely to change, but it conceivably
could be false on other systems that otherwise reproduce the linux
syscall api/abi.
only a few parts of the code were actually still using the cached pid.
in a couple places (aio and synccall) it was a minor optimization to
avoid a syscall. caching could be reintroduced, but lazily as part of
the public getpid function rather than at program startup, if it's
deemed important for performance later. in other places (cancellation
and pthread_kill) the pid was completely unnecessary; the tkill
syscall can be used instead of tgkill. this is actually a rather
subtle issue, since tgkill is supposedly a solution to race conditions
that can affect use of tkill. however, as documented in the commit
message for commit 7779dbd266, tgkill
does not actually solve this race; it just limits it to happening
within one process rather than between processes. we use a lock that
avoids the race in pthread_kill, and the use in the cancellation
signal handler is self-targeted and thus not subject to tid reuse
races, so both are safe regardless of which syscall (tgkill or tkill)
is used.
this commit adds non-stub implementations of setlocale, duplocale,
newlocale, and uselocale, along with the data structures and minimal
code needed for representing the active locale on a per-thread basis
and optimizing the common case where thread-local locale settings are
not in use.
at this point, the data structures only contain what is necessary to
represent LC_CTYPE (a single flag) and LC_MESSAGES (a name for use in
finding message translation files). representation for the other
categories will be added later; the expectation is that a single
pointer will suffice for each.
for LC_CTYPE, the strings "C" and "POSIX" are treated as special; any
other string is accepted and treated as "C.UTF-8". for other
categories, any string is accepted after being truncated to a maximum
supported length (currently 15 bytes). for LC_MESSAGES, the name is
kept regardless of whether libc itself can use such a message
translation locale, since applications using catgets or gettext should
be able to use message locales libc is not aware of. for other
categories, names which are not successfully loaded as locales (which,
at present, means all names) are treated as aliases for "C". setlocale
never fails.
locale settings are not yet used anywhere, so this commit should have
no visible effects except for the contents of the string returned by
setlocale.
such separation serves multiple purposes:
- by having the common path for __tls_get_addr alone in its own
function with a tail call to the slow case, code generation is
greatly improved.
- by having __tls_get_addr in it own file, it can be replaced on a
per-arch basis as needed, for optimization or ABI-specific purposes.
- by removing __tls_get_addr from __init_tls.c, a few bytes of code
are shaved off of static binaries (which are unlikely to use this
function unless the linker messed up).
the motivation for the errno_ptr field in the thread structure, which
this commit removes, was to allow the main thread's errno to keep its
address when lazy thread pointer initialization was used. &errno was
evaluated prior to setting up the thread pointer and stored in
errno_ptr for the main thread; subsequently created threads would have
errno_ptr pointing to their own errno_val in the thread structure.
since lazy initialization was removed, there is no need for this extra
level of indirection; __errno_location can simply return the address
of the thread's errno_val directly. this does cause &errno to change,
but the change happens before entry to application code, and thus is
not observable.
such kernels cannot support threads, but the thread pointer is also
important for other purposes, most notably stack protector. without a
valid thread pointer, all code compiled with stack protector will
crash. the same applies to any use of thread-local storage by
applications or libraries.
the concept of this patch is to fall back to using the modify_ldt
syscall, which has been around since linux 1.0, to setup the gs
segment register. since the kernel does not have a way to
automatically assign ldt entries, use of slot zero is hard-coded. if
this fallback path is used, __set_thread_area returns a positive value
(rather than the usual zero for success, or negative for error)
indicating to the caller that the thread pointer was successfully set,
but only for the main thread, and that thread creation will not work
properly. the code in __init_tp has been changed accordingly to record
this result for later use by pthread_create.
such archs are expected to omit definitions of the SYS_* macros for
syscalls their kernels lack from arch/$ARCH/bits/syscall.h. the
preprocessor is then able to select the an appropriate implementation
for affected functions. two basic strategies are used on a
case-by-case basis:
where the old syscalls correspond to deprecated library-level
functions, the deprecated functions have been converted to wrappers
for the modern function, and the modern function has fallback code
(omitted at the preprocessor level on new archs) to make use of the
old syscalls if the new syscall fails with ENOSYS. this also improves
functionality on older kernels and eliminates the incentive to program
with deprecated library-level functions for the sake of compatibility
with older kernels.
in other situations where the old syscalls correspond to library-level
functions which are not deprecated but merely lack some new features,
such as the *at functions, the old syscalls are still used on archs
which support them. this may change at some point in the future if or
when fallback code is added to the new functions to make them usable
(possibly with reduced functionality) on old kernels.
open is handled specially because it is used from so many places, in
so many variants (2 or 3 arguments, setting errno or not, and
cancellable or not). trying to do it as a function would not only
increase bloat, but would also risk subtle breakage.
this is the first step towards supporting "new" archs where linux
lacks "old" syscalls.
being static allows it to be inlined in __libc_start_main; inlining
should take place at all levels since the function is called exactly
once. this further reduces mandatory startup code size for static
binaries.
there is no reason (and seemingly there never was any) for
__init_security to be its own function. it's linked unconditionally
so it can just be placed inline in __init_libc.
moving the call to __init_ssp from __init_security to __init_libc
makes __init_security a leaf function, which allows the compiler to
make it smaller. __init_libc is already non-leaf, and the additional
call makes no difference to the amount of register spillage.
in addition, it really made no sense for the call to __init_ssp to be
buried inside __init_security rather than parallel with other init
functions.
the function itself was static, but the weak alias provided an
externally visible reference and thus prevented the dead code from
being omitted from the output. so this change actually reduces bloat
in mandatory static-linked code.
now that thread pointer is initialized always, ssp canary
initialization can be done unconditionally. this simplifies
the ldso as it does not try to detect ssp usage, and the
init function itself as it is always called exactly once.
this also merges ssp init path for shared and static linking.
this is the first step in an overhaul aimed at greatly simplifying and
optimizing everything dealing with thread-local state.
previously, the thread pointer was initialized lazily on first access,
or at program startup if stack protector was in use, or at certain
random places where inconsistent state could be reached if it were not
initialized early. while believed to be fully correct, the logic was
fragile and non-obvious.
in the first phase of the thread pointer overhaul, support is retained
(and in some cases improved) for systems/situation where loading the
thread pointer fails, e.g. old kernels.
some notes on specific changes:
- the confusing use of libc.main_thread as an indicator that the
thread pointer is initialized is eliminated in favor of an explicit
has_thread_pointer predicate.
- sigaction no longer needs to ensure that the thread pointer is
initialized before installing a signal handler (this was needed to
prevent a situation where the signal handler caused the thread
pointer to be initialized and the subsequent sigreturn cleared it
again) but it still needs to ensure that implementation-internal
thread-related signals are not blocked.
- pthread tsd initialization for the main thread is deferred in a new
manner to minimize bloat in the static-linked __init_tp code.
- pthread_setcancelstate no longer needs special handling for the
situation before the thread pointer is initialized. it simply fails
on systems that cannot support a thread pointer, which are
non-conforming anyway.
- pthread_cleanup_push/pop now check for missing thread pointer and
nop themselves out in this case, so stdio no longer needs to avoid
the cancellable path when the thread pointer is not available.
a number of cases remain where certain interfaces may crash if the
system does not support a thread pointer. at this point, these should
be limited to pthread interfaces, and the number of such cases should
be fewer than before.
the external mmap function is heavy because it has to handle error
reporting that the kernel cannot do, and has to do some locking for
arcane race-condition-avoidance purposes. for allocating initial TLS,
we do not need any of that; the raw syscall suffices.
on i386, this change shaves off 13% of the size of .text for the empty
program.
PAGE_SIZE was hardcoded to 4096, which is historically what most
systems use, but on several archs it is a kernel config parameter,
user space can only know it at execution time from the aux vector.
PAGE_SIZE and PAGESIZE are not defined on archs where page size is
a runtime parameter, applications should use sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE)
to query it. Internally libc code defines PAGE_SIZE to libc.page_size,
which is set to aux[AT_PAGESZ] in __init_libc and early in __dynlink
as well. (Note that libc.page_size can be accessed without GOT, ie.
before relocations are done)
Some fpathconf settings are hardcoded to 4096, these should be actually
queried from the filesystem using statfs.
this is needed for reused threads in the SIGEV_THREAD timer
notification system, and could be reused elsewhere in the future if
needed, though it should be refactored for such use.
for static linking, __init_tls.c is simply modified to export the TLS
info in a structure with external linkage, rather than using statics.
this perhaps makes the code more clear, since the statics were poorly
named for statics. the new __reset_tls.c is only linked if it is used.
for dynamic linking, the code is in dynlink.c. sharing code with
__copy_tls is not practical since __reset_tls must also re-zero
thread-local bss.
these functions were mistakenly assumed to be needed to match glibc
ABI, but glibc has them as part of the non-shared part of libc that's
always statically linked into the main program. moreover, the only
place they are referenced from is glibc's crt1.o.
modern (4.7.x and later) gcc uses init/fini arrays, rather than the
legacy _init/_fini function pasting and crtbegin/crtend ctors/dtors
system, on most or all archs. some archs had already switched a long
time ago. without following this change, global ctors/dtors will cease
to work under musl when building with new gcc versions.
the most surprising part of this patch is that it actually reduces the
size of the init code, for both static and shared libc. this is
achieved by (1) unifying the handling main program and shared
libraries in the dynamic linker, and (2) eliminating the
glibc-inspired rube goldberg machine for passing around init and fini
function pointers. to clarify, some background:
the function signature for __libc_start_main was based on glibc, as
part of the original goal of being able to run some glibc-linked
binaries. it worked by having the crt1 code, which is linked into
every application, static or dynamic, obtain and pass pointers to the
init and fini functions, which __libc_start_main is then responsible
for using and recording for later use, as necessary. however, in
neither the static-linked nor dynamic-linked case do we actually need
crt1.o's help. with dynamic linking, all the pointers are available in
the _DYNAMIC block. with static linking, it's safe to simply access
the _init/_fini and __init_array_start, etc. symbols directly.
obviously changing the __libc_start_main function signature in an
incompatible way would break both old musl-linked programs and
glibc-linked programs, so let's not do that. instead, the function can
just ignore the information it doesn't need. new archs need not even
provide the useless args in their versions of crt1.o. existing archs
should continue to provide it as long as there is an interest in
having newly-linked applications be able to run on old versions of
musl; at some point in the future, this support can be removed.
apparently this was never noticed before because the linker normally
optimizes dynamic TLS models to non-dynamic ones when static linking,
thus eliminating the calls to __tls_get_addr which crash when the dtv
is missing. however, some libsupc++ code on ARM was calling
__tls_get_addr when static linked and crashing. the reason is unclear
to me, but with this issue fixed it should work now anyway.
this is a bit ugly, and the motivation for supporting it is
questionable. however the main factors were:
1. it will be useful to have this for certain internal purposes
anyway -- things like syslog.
2. applications can just save argv[0] in main, but it's hard to fix
non-portable library code that's depending on being able to get the
invocation name without the main application's help.
libc is the macro, __libc is the internal symbol, but under some
configurations on old/broken compilers, the symbol might not actually
exist and the libc macro might instead use __libc_loc() to obtain
access to the object.
previously, shared library constructors were being called before
important internal things like the environment (extern char **environ)
and hwcap flags (needed for sjlj to work right with float on arm) were
initialized in __libc_start_main. rather than trying to have to
dynamic linker make sure this stuff all gets initialized right, I've
opted to just defer calling shared library constructors until after
the main program's entry point is reached. this also fixes the order
of ctors to be the exact reverse of dtors, which is a desirable
property and possibly even mandated by some languages.
the main practical effect of this change is that shared libraries
calling getenv from ctors will no longer fail.
this mirrors the stdio_impl.h cleanup. one header which is not
strictly needed, errno.h, is left in pthread_impl.h, because since
pthread functions return their error codes rather than using errno,
nearly every single pthread function needs the errno constants.
in a few places, rather than bringing in string.h to use memset, the
memset was replaced by direct assignment. this seems to generate much
better code anyway, and makes many functions which were previously
non-leaf functions into leaf functions (possibly eliminating a great
deal of bloat on some platforms where non-leaf functions require ugly
prologue and/or epilogue).
the behavior of putenv is left undefined if the argument does not
contain an equal sign, but traditional implementations behave this way
and gnulib replaces putenv if it doesn't do this.
despite documentation that makes it sound a lot different, the only
ABI-constraint difference between TLS variants II and I seems to be
that variant II stores the initial TLS segment immediately below the
thread pointer (i.e. the thread pointer points to the end of it) and
variant I stores the initial TLS segment above the thread pointer,
requiring the thread descriptor to be stored below. the actual value
stored in the thread pointer register also tends to have per-arch
random offsets applied to it for silly micro-optimization purposes.
with these changes applied, TLS should be basically working on all
supported archs except microblaze. I'm still working on getting the
necessary information and a working toolchain that can build TLS
binaries for microblaze, but in theory, static-linked programs with
TLS and dynamic-linked programs where only the main executable uses
TLS should already work on microblaze.
alignment constraints have not yet been heavily tested, so it's
possible that this code does not always align TLS segments correctly
on archs that need TLS variant I.
this doubles the performance of the fastest syscalls on the atom I
tested it on; improvement is reportedly much more dramatic on
worst-case cpus. cannot be used for cancellable syscalls.
the code in __libc_start_main is now responsible for parsing auxv,
rather than duplicating the parsing all over the place. this should
shave off a few cycles and some code size. __init_libc is left as an
external-linkage function despite the fact that it could be static, to
prevent it from being inlined and permanently wasting stack space when
main is called.
a few other minor changes are included, like eliminating per-thread
ssp canaries (they were likely broken when combined with certain
dlopen usages, and completely unnecessary) and some other unnecessary
checks. since this code gets linked into every program, it should be
as small and simple as possible.
unlike other implementations, this one reserves memory for new TLS in
all pre-existing threads at dlopen-time, and dlopen will fail with no
resources consumed and no new libraries loaded if memory is not
available. memory is not immediately distributed to running threads;
that would be too complex and too costly. instead, assurances are made
that threads needing the new TLS can obtain it in an async-signal-safe
way from a buffer belonging to the dynamic linker/new module (via
atomic fetch-and-add based allocator).
I've re-appropriated the lock that was previously used for __synccall
(synchronizing set*id() syscalls between threads) as a general
pthread_create lock. it's a "backwards" rwlock where the "read"
operation is safe atomic modification of the live thread count, which
multiple threads can perform at the same time, and the "write"
operation is making sure the count does not increase during an
operation that depends on it remaining bounded (__synccall or dlopen).
in static-linked programs that don't use __synccall, this lock is a
no-op and has no cost.
Rich Felker
Szabolcs Nagy
Timo Teräs