While calculating the number of stashed pointers, multiple variables
potentially modified by a concurrent thread were used for the
calculation. This led to some inconsistencies, correctly detected by
the assertions. The change eliminates some possible inconsistencies by
using unmodified variables and only once a concurrently modified one.
The assertions are omitted for the cases where we acknowledge potential
inconsistencies too.
The option makes the process to exit with error code 1 if a memory leak
is detected. This is useful for implementing automated tools that rely
on leak detection.
On deallocation, sampled pointers (specially aligned) get junked and stashed
into tcache (to prevent immediate reuse). The expected behavior is to have
read-after-free corrupted and stopped by the junk-filling, while
write-after-free is checked when flushing the stashed pointers.
nstime module guarantees monotonic clock update within a single nstime_t. This
means, if two separate nstime_t variables are read and updated separately,
nstime_subtract between them may result in underflow. Fixed by switching to the
time since utility provided by nstime.
Currently used only for guarding purposes, the hint is used to determine
if the allocation is supposed to be frequently reused. For example, it
might urge the allocator to ensure the allocation is cached.
Some nstime_t operations require and assume the input nstime is initialized
(e.g. nstime_update) -- uninitialized input may cause silent failures which is
difficult to reproduce / debug. Add an explicit flag to track the state
(limited to debug build only).
Also fixed an use case in hpa (time of last_purge).
In order for nstime_update to handle non-monotonic clocks, it requires the input
nstime to be initialized -- when reading for the first time, zero init has to be
done. Otherwise random stack value may be seen as clocks and returned.
When opt_retain is on, slab extents remain guarded in all states, even
retained. This works well if arena is never destroyed, because we
anticipate those slabs will be eventually reused. But if the arena is
destroyed, the slabs must be unguarded to prevent leaking guard pages.
On the rtree metadata lookup fast path, there will never be a NULL returned when
the cache key matches (which is unknown to the compiler). The previous logic
was checking for NULL return value, resulting in the extra branch (in addition to
the cache key match checking). Make the lookup_fast return a bool to indicate
cache miss / match, so that the extra branch is avoided.
Adding guarded extents, which are regular extents surrounded by guard pages
(mprotected). To reduce syscalls, small guarded extents are cached as a
separate eset in ecache, and decay through the dirty / muzzy / retained pipeline
as usual.
This mallctl accepts an arena_config_t structure which
can be used to customize the behavior of the arena.
Right now it contains extent_hooks and a new option,
metadata_use_hooks, which controls whether the extent
hooks are also used for metadata allocation.
The medata_use_hooks option has two main use cases:
1. In heterogeneous memory systems, to avoid metadata
being placed on potentially slower memory.
2. Avoiding virtual memory from being leaked as a result
of metadata allocation failure originating in an extent hook.
Existing backtrace implementations skip native stack frames from runtimes like
Python. The hook allows to augment the backtraces to attribute allocations to
native functions in heap profiles.
This change allows every allocator conforming to PAI communicate that it
deferred some work for the future. Without it if a background thread goes into
indefinite sleep, there is no way to notify it about upcoming deferred work.
Previously the calculation of sleep time between wakeups was implemented within
background_thread. This resulted in some parts of decay and hpa specific
logic mixing with background thread implementation. In this change, background
thread delegates this calculation to arena and it, in turn, delegates it to PAI.
The next step is to implement the actual calculation of time until deferred work
in HPA.
Retained pages are those which haven't been touched and are unbacked from OS
perspective. For a pageslab their number should equal "total pages in slab"
minus "touched pages".
By force-inlining everything that would otherwise be a macro, we get the same
effect (it's not clear in the first place that this is actually a good idea, but
it avoids making any changes to the existing performance profile).
This makes the code more maintainable (in anticipation of subsequent changes),
as well as making performance profiles and debug info more readable (we get
"real" line numbers, instead of making everything point to the macro definition
of all associated functions).
The edata_cache_small had a fill/flush heuristic. In retrospect, this was a
premature optimization; more testing indicates that an unbounded cache is
effectively fine here, and moreover we spend a nontrivial amount of time doing
unnecessary filling/flushing.
As the HPA takes on a larger and larger fraction of all allocations, any
theoretical differences in allocation patterns should shrink. The HPA is more
efficient with its metadata in general, so it still comes out ahead on metadata
usage anyways.
