From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-3.3 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H3,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 26918 invoked from network); 25 May 2020 18:13:22 -0000 Received: from mother.openwall.net (195.42.179.200) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 25 May 2020 18:13:22 -0000 Received: (qmail 3607 invoked by uid 550); 25 May 2020 18:13:17 -0000 Mailing-List: contact musl-help@lists.openwall.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-ID: Reply-To: musl@lists.openwall.com Received: (qmail 3586 invoked from network); 25 May 2020 18:13:16 -0000 X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-2.10.1 (20141025) (Debian) at wwcom.ch To: Rich Felker Cc: musl@lists.openwall.com References: <20200510180934.GV21576@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20200516002912.GN21576@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20200516032901.GO21576@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20200517033025.GQ21576@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20200518185351.GF21576@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <4abf07d7-542a-414f-9cc2-2fdf60074462@wwcom.ch> <20200525175446.GR1079@brightrain.aerifal.cx> From: Pirmin Walthert Message-ID: Date: Mon, 25 May 2020 20:13:02 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20200525175446.GR1079@brightrain.aerifal.cx> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Language: en-US Subject: Re: [musl] mallocng progress and growth chart Am 25.05.20 um 19:54 schrieb Rich Felker: > On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 05:45:33PM +0200, Pirmin Walthert wrote: >> Am 18.05.20 um 20:53 schrieb Rich Felker: >> >>> On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 11:30:25PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote: >>>> Another alternative for avoiding eagar commit at low usage, which >>>> works for all but nommu: when adding groups with nontrivial slot count >>>> at low usage, don't activate all the slots right away. Reserve vm >>>> space for 7 slots for a 7x4672, but only unprotect the first 2 pages, >>>> and treat it as a group of just 1 slot until there are no slots free >>>> and one is needed. Then, unprotect another page (or more if needed to >>>> fit another slot, as would be needed at larger sizes) and adjust the >>>> slot count to match. (Conceptually; implementation-wise, the slot >>>> count would be fixed, and there would just be a limit on the number of >>>> slots made avilable when transformed from "freed" to "available" for >>>> activation.) >>>> >>>> Note that this is what happens anyway with physical memory as clean >>>> anonymous pages are first touched, but (1) doing it without explicit >>>> unprotect over-counts the not-yet-used slots for commit charge >>>> purposes and breaks tightly-memory-constrained environments (global >>>> commit limit or cgroup) and (2) when all slots are initially available >>>> as they are now, repeated free/malloc cycles for the same size will >>>> round-robin all the slots, touching them all. >>>> >>>> Here, property (2) is of course desirable for hardening at moderate to >>>> high usage, but at low usage UAF tends to be less of a concern >>>> (because you don't have complex data structures with complex lifetimes >>>> if you hardly have any malloc). >>>> c >>>> Note also that (2) could be solved without addressing (1) just by >>>> skipping the protection aspect of this idea and only using the >>>> available-slot-limiting part. >>> One abstract way of thinking about the above is that it's just a >>> per-size-class bump allocator, pre-reserving enough virtual address >>> space to end sufficiently close to a page boundary that there's no >>> significant memory waste. This is actually fairly elegant, and might >>> obsolete some of the other measures taken to avoid overly eagar >>> allocation. So this might be a worthwhile direction to pursue. >> Dear Rich, >> >> Currently we use mallocng in production for most applications in our >> "embedded like" virtualised system setups, it even helped to find >> some bugs (for example in asterisk) as mallocng was less forgiving >> than the old malloc implementation. So if you're interested in real >> world feedback: everything seems to be running quite smoothly so >> far, thanks for this great work. >> >> Currently we use the git version of April 24th, so the version >> before you merged the huge optimization changes. As you mentioned in >> your "brainstorming mails", if I got them right, that you might >> rethink a few of these changes, I'd like to ask: do you think it >> would be better to use the current git-master version rather than >> the version of April 24th (we are not THAT memory constrained, so >> stability is the most important thing) or do you think it would be >> better to stick on the old version and wait for the next changes to >> be merged? > Thanks for the feedback! > > Which are the "huge optimization changes" you're wondering about? > Indeed there's a large series of commits after the version you're > using but I think you're possibly misattributing them. > > A number of the commits are bug fixes -- mostly not for hard bugs, but > for unwanted and unintended behaviors: > > a709dde fix unexpected allocation of 7x144 group in non-power-of-two slot > dda5a88 fix exact size tracking in memalign > 915a914 adjust several size classes to fix nested groups of non-power-of-2 size > 7acd61e allow in-place realloc when ideal size class is off-by-one > caca917 add support for aligned_alloc alignments 1M and over > > There were also quite a few around an idea that didn't go well and was > mostly reverted, but with major improvements to the original behavior: > > 5bff93c overhaul bounce counter to work with map sizes instead of size classes > 71262cd tune bounce counter to avoid triggering early > 9601aaa prevent overflow of unmap counter part of bounce counter > aca1f32 don't let the mmap cache limit grow unboundedly or overflow > 6fbee31 second partial overhaul of bounce counter system > 150de6e revert from map cache to old okay_to_free scheme, but improved > 1e972da initial conversion of bounce counting to use sequence numbers, decay > e3eecb1 factor bounce/sequence counter logic into meta.h > 6693738 account seq for individually-mmapped allocations above hard threshold > 4443f64 fix complete regression (malloc always fails) on variable-pagesize archs > > If you don't care about low usage, that whole change series is fairly > unimportant, but should be harmless. It just changes decisions about > choices where either choice produces as valid state for the allocator > but there are tradeoffs between memory usage and performance. The new > behavior should be better, though. > > A few commits were reordering the dependency between memalign and the > standard memalign-variant functions, which is a minor namespace > detail: > > da4c88e rename aligned_alloc.c > 04407f7 reverse dependency order of memalign and aligned_alloc > 74e6657 rename aligned_alloc source file back to its proper name > c990cb1 rename memalign source file back to its proper name > > A couple were hardening: > > 5bf4e92 clear group header pointer to meta when freeing groups > bd04c75 in get_meta, check offset against maplen (minor hardening) > 77cea57 add support for allocating meta areas via legacy brk > > And pretty much all the rest of the changes are tuning behavior for > "optimization" of some sort or another, which may be what you were > referring to: > > 26143c4 limit slot count growth to 25% instead of 50% of current usage in class > a9187f0 remove unnecessary optimization tuning flags from Makefile CFLAGS > 045cc04 move coarse size classing logic to malloc fast path > 8348a82 eliminate med_twos_tab > e619034 allow slot count 1 for size classes 3 mod 4 as natural/first-class > c9d54f4 activate coarse size classing for small classes down to 4 (but not 6) > 44092d8 improve individual-mmap decision > d355eaf remove slot count reduction to 1 for size classes 1 mod 3 > c555ebe fix off-by-one in logic to use single-slot groups > 9d5ec34 switch from MADV_DONTNEED to MADV_FREE for large free slots > 584c7aa avoid over-use of reduced-count groups due to coarse size classing > f9bfb0a increase threshold for 3->2 slot reduction to 16 pages > 20da09e disable coarse size classing for large classes (over 8k) > > I don't think any of these changes are potentially obsoleted by > further ideas in the above thread. I am working on delaying activation > of slots until they're actually needed, so that we don't dirty pages > we could avoid touching, but I proposed this as an alternative to > other more complex tricks that I didn't really like, which have not > been implemented and probably won't be now. > > So, in summary, I don't see any good reason not to go with latest. > > Rich Many thanks for your detailed answer. I'll give it a try then! Pirmin