History log of /seL4-test-master/projects/musllibc/src/thread/synccall.c
Revision Date Author Comments
# 56fbaa3b 03-Mar-2015 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

make all objects used with atomic operations volatile

the memory model we use internally for atomics permits plain loads of
values which may be subject to concurrent modification without
requiring that a special load function be used. since a compiler is
free to make transformations that alter the number of loads or the way
in which loads are performed, the compiler is theoretically free to
break this usage. the most obvious concern is with atomic cas
constructs: something of the form tmp=*p;a_cas(p,tmp,f(tmp)); could be
transformed to a_cas(p,*p,f(*p)); where the latter is intended to show
multiple loads of *p whose resulting values might fail to be equal;
this would break the atomicity of the whole operation. but even more
fundamental breakage is possible.

with the changes being made now, objects that may be modified by
atomics are modeled as volatile, and the atomic operations performed
on them by other threads are modeled as asynchronous stores by
hardware which happens to be acting on the request of another thread.
such modeling of course does not itself address memory synchronization
between cores/cpus, but that aspect was already handled. this all
seems less than ideal, but it's the best we can do without mandating a
C11 compiler and using the C11 model for atomics.

in the case of pthread_once_t, the ABI type of the underlying object
is not volatile-qualified. so we are assuming that accessing the
object through a volatile-qualified lvalue via casts yields volatile
access semantics. the language of the C standard is somewhat unclear
on this matter, but this is an assumption the linux kernel also makes,
and seems to be the correct interpretation of the standard.


# 78a8ef47 15-Jan-2015 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

overhaul __synccall and fix AS-safety and other issues in set*id

multi-threaded set*id and setrlimit use the internal __synccall
function to work around the kernel's wrongful treatment of these
process properties as thread-local. the old implementation of
__synccall failed to be AS-safe, despite POSIX requiring setuid and
setgid to be AS-safe, and was not rigorous in assuring that all
threads were caught. in a worst case, threads late in the process of
exiting could retain permissions after setuid reported success, in
which case attacks to regain dropped permissions may have been
possible under the right conditions.

the new implementation of __synccall depends on the presence of
/proc/self/task and will fail if it can't be opened, but is able to
determine that it has caught all threads, and does not use any locks
except its own. it thereby achieves AS-safety simply by blocking
signals to preclude re-entry in the same thread.

with this commit, all known conformance and safety issues in set*id
functions should be fixed.


# 83dc6eb0 05-Jul-2014 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

eliminate use of cached pid from thread structure

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 7779dbd2663269b465951189b4f43e70839bc073, 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.


# 57174444 11-Dec-2013 Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@port70.net>

include cleanups: remove unused headers and add feature test macros


# b4b9743c 02-Sep-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

fix mips-specific bug in synccall (too little space for signal mask)

switch to the new __block_all_sigs/__restore_sigs internal API to
clean up the code too.


# 3c0501d2 02-Sep-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

in synccall, ignore the signal before any threads' signal handlers return

this protects against deadlock from spurious signals (e.g. sent by
another process) arriving after the controlling thread releases the
other threads from the sync operation.


# a731e410 02-Sep-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

fix invalid pointer in synccall (multithread setuid, etc.)

the head pointer was not being reset between calls to synccall, so any
use of this interface more than once would build the linked list
incorrectly, keeping the (now invalid) list nodes from the previous
call.


# 47d2bf51 26-Apr-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

synccall signal handler need not handle dead threads anymore

they have already blocked signals before decrementing the thread
count, so the code being removed is unreachable in the case where the
thread is no longer counted.


# ccc7b4c3 26-Mar-2013 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

remove __SYSCALL_SSLEN arch macro in favor of using public _NSIG

the issue at hand is that many syscalls require as an argument the
kernel-ABI size of sigset_t, intended to allow the kernel to switch to
a larger sigset_t in the future. previously, each arch was defining
this size in syscall_arch.h, which was redundant with the definition
of _NSIG in bits/signal.h. as it's used in some not-quite-portable
application code as well, _NSIG is much more likely to be recognized
and understood immediately by someone reading the code, and it's also
shorter and less cluttered.

note that _NSIG is actually 65/129, not 64/128, but the division takes
care of throwing away the off-by-one part.


# efd4d87a 08-Nov-2012 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

clean up sloppy nested inclusion from pthread_impl.h

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).


# dcd60371 05-Oct-2012 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

support for TLS in dynamic-loaded (dlopen) modules

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.


# 2f437040 09-Aug-2012 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

fix (hopefully) all hard-coded 8's for kernel sigset_t size

some minor changes to how hard-coded sets for thread-related purposes
are handled were also needed, since the old object sizes were not
necessarily sufficient. things have gotten a bit ugly in this area,
and i think a cleanup is in order at some point, but for now the goal
is just to get the code working on all supported archs including mips,
which was badly broken by linux rejecting syscalls with the wrong
sigset_t size.


# 0c29adfe 22-May-2012 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

remove everything related to forkall

i made a best attempt, but the intended semantics of this function are
fundamentally contradictory. there is no consistent way to handle
ownership of locks when forking a multi-threaded process. the code
could have worked by accident for programs that only used normal
mutexes and nothing else (since they don't actually store or care
about their owner), but that's about it. broken-by-design interfaces
that aren't even in glibc (only solaris) don't belong in musl.


# 407d9330 12-Aug-2011 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

pthread and synccall cleanup, new __synccall_wait op

fix up clone signature to match the actual behavior. the new
__syncall_wait function allows a __synccall callback to wait for other
threads to continue without returning, so that it can resume action
after the caller finishes. this interface could be made significantly
more general/powerful with minimal effort, but i'll wait to do that
until it's actually useful for something.


# 7dd60b80 29-Jul-2011 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

fix bug in synccall with no threads: lock was taken but never released


# acb04806 29-Jul-2011 Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>

new attempt at making set*id() safe and robust

changing credentials in a multi-threaded program is extremely
difficult on linux because it requires synchronizing the change
between all threads, which have their own thread-local credentials on
the kernel side. this is further complicated by the fact that changing
the real uid can fail due to exceeding RLIMIT_NPROC, making it
possible that the syscall will succeed in some threads but fail in
others.

the old __rsyscall approach being replaced was robust in that it would
report failure if any one thread failed, but in this case, the program
would be left in an inconsistent state where individual threads might
have different uid. (this was not as bad as glibc, which would
sometimes even fail to report the failure entirely!)

the new approach being committed refuses to change real user id when
it cannot temporarily set the rlimit to infinity. this is completely
POSIX conformant since POSIX does not require an implementation to
allow real-user-id changes for non-privileged processes whatsoever.
still, setting the real uid can fail due to memory allocation in the
kernel, but this can only happen if there is not already a cached
object for the target user. thus, we forcibly serialize the syscalls
attempts, and fail the entire operation on the first failure. this
*should* lead to an all-or-nothing success/failure result, but it's
still fragile and highly dependent on kernel developers not breaking
things worse than they're already broken.

ideally linux will eventually add a CLONE_USERCRED flag that would
give POSIX conformant credential changes without any hacks from
userspace, and all of this code would become redundant and could be
removed ~10 years down the line when everyone has abandoned the old
broken kernels. i'm not holding my breath...