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.
the design for TLS in dynamic-linked programs is mostly complete too,
but I have not yet implemented it. cost is nonzero but still low for
programs which do not use TLS and/or do not use threads (a few hundred
bytes of new code, plus dependency on memcpy). i believe it can be
made smaller at some point by merging __init_tls and __init_security
into __libc_start_main and avoiding duplicate auxv-parsing code.
at the same time, I've also slightly changed the logic pthread_create
uses to allocate guard pages to ensure that guard pages are not
counted towards commit charge.
previously, this usage could lead to a crash if the thread pointer was
still uninitialized, and otherwise would just cause the canary to be
zero (less secure).
it's expected that this will be needed/useful only in asm, so I've
given it its own symbol that can be addressed in pc-relative ways from
asm rather than adding a field in the __libc structure which would
require hard-coding the offset wherever it's used.
pthread structure has been adjusted to match the glibc/GCC abi for
where the canary is stored on i386 and x86_64. it will need variants
for other archs to provide the added security of the canary's entropy,
but even without that it still works as well as the old "minimal" ssp
support. eventually such changes will be made anyway, since they are
also needed for GCC/C11 thread-local storage support (not yet
implemented).
care is taken not to attempt initializing the thread pointer unless
the program actually uses SSP (by reference to __stack_chk_fail).
the code is written to pre-init the thread pointer in static linked
programs that pull in __stack_chk_fail or dynamic-linked programs that
lookup the symbol. no explicit canary is set; the canary will be
whatever happens to be in the thread structure at the offset gcc
hard-coded. this can be improved later.
this behavior (opening fds 0-2 for a suid program) is explicitly
allowed (but not required) by POSIX to protect badly-written suid
programs from clobbering files they later open.
this commit does add some cost in startup code, but the availability
of auxv and the security flag will be useful elsewhere in the future.
in particular auxv is needed for static-linked vdso support, which is
still waiting to be committed (sorry nik!)
thanks to mikachu
per POSIX:
The setenv() function shall fail if:
[EINVAL] The name argument is a null pointer, points to an empty
string, or points to a string containing an '=' character.
Rich Felker
Timo Teräs
Szabolcs Nagy