Malloc debug rewrite.

The major components of the rewrite:

- Completely remove the qemu shared library code. Nobody was using it
  and it appears to have broken at some point.
- Adds the ability to enable/disable different options independently.
- Adds a new option that can enable the backtrace on alloc/free when
  a process gets a specific signal.
- Adds a new way to enable malloc debug. If a special property is
  set, and the process has an environment variable set, then debug
  malloc will be enabled. This allows something that might be
  a derivative of app_process to be started with an environment variable
  being enabled.
- get_malloc_leak_info() used to return one element for each pointer that
  had the exact same backtrace. The new version returns information for
  every one of the pointers with same backtrace. It turns out ddms already
  automatically coalesces these, so the old method simply hid the fact
  that there where multiple pointers with the same amount of backtrace.
- Moved all of the malloc debug specific code into the library.
  Nothing related to the malloc debug data structures remains in libc.
- Removed the calls to the debug malloc cleanup routine. Instead, I
  added an atexit call with the debug malloc cleanup routine. This gets
  around most problems related to the timing of doing the cleanup.

The new properties and environment variables:

libc.debug.malloc.options
  Set by option name (such as "backtrace"). Setting this to a bad value
  will cause a usage statement to be printed to the log.

libc.debug.malloc.program
  Same as before. If this is set, then only the program named will
  be launched with malloc debug enabled. This is not a complete match,
  but if any part of the property is in the program name, malloc debug is
  enabled.

libc.debug.malloc.env_enabled
  If set, then malloc debug is only enabled if the running process has the
  environment variable LIBC_DEBUG_MALLOC_ENABLE set.

Bug: 19145921

Change-Id: I7b0e58cc85cc6d4118173fe1f8627a391b64c0d7
44 files changed
tree: 25aeae686d92efcb5e08a54e8cba1e8c31efe33b
  1. benchmarks/
  2. build/
  3. libc/
  4. libdl/
  5. libm/
  6. libstdc++/
  7. linker/
  8. tests/
  9. tools/
  10. .clang-format
  11. .gitignore
  12. Android.mk
  13. CleanSpec.mk
  14. CPPLINT.cfg
  15. README.md
README.md

Working on bionic

What are the big pieces of bionic?

libc/ --- libc.so, libc.a

The C library. Stuff like fopen(3) and kill(2).

libm/ --- libm.so, libm.a

The math library. Traditionally Unix systems kept stuff like sin(3) and cos(3) in a separate library to save space in the days before shared libraries.

libdl/ --- libdl.so

The dynamic linker interface library. This is actually just a bunch of stubs that the dynamic linker replaces with pointers to its own implementation at runtime. This is where stuff like dlopen(3) lives.

libstdc++/ --- libstdc++.so

The C++ ABI support functions. The C++ compiler doesn't know how to implement thread-safe static initialization and the like, so it just calls functions that are supplied by the system. Stuff like __cxa_guard_acquire and __cxa_pure_virtual live here.

linker/ --- /system/bin/linker and /system/bin/linker64

The dynamic linker. When you run a dynamically-linked executable, its ELF file has a DT_INTERP entry that says “use the following program to start me”. On Android, that‘s either linker or linker64 (depending on whether it’s a 32-bit or 64-bit executable). It's responsible for loading the ELF executable into memory and resolving references to symbols (so that when your code tries to jump to fopen(3), say, it lands in the right place).

tests/ --- unit tests

The tests/ directory contains unit tests. Roughly arranged as one file per publicly-exported header file.

benchmarks/ --- benchmarks

The benchmarks/ directory contains benchmarks.

What's in libc/?

Adding system calls

Adding a system call usually involves:

  1. Add entries to SYSCALLS.TXT. See SYSCALLS.TXT itself for documentation on the format.
  2. Run the gensyscalls.py script.
  3. Add constants (and perhaps types) to the appropriate header file. Note that you should check to see whether the constants are already in kernel uapi header files, in which case you just need to make sure that the appropriate POSIX header file in libc/include/ includes the relevant file or files.
  4. Add function declarations to the appropriate header file.
  5. Add at least basic tests. Even a test that deliberately supplies an invalid argument helps check that we're generating the right symbol and have the right declaration in the header file. (And strace(1) can confirm that the correct system call is being made.)

Updating kernel header files

As mentioned above, this is currently a two-step process:

  1. Use generate_uapi_headers.sh to go from a Linux source tree to appropriate contents for external/kernel-headers/.
  2. Run update_all.py to scrub those headers and import them into bionic.

Updating tzdata

This is fully automated (and these days handled by the libcore team, because they own icu, and that needs to be updated in sync with bionic):

  1. Run update-tzdata.py in external/icu/tools/.

Verifying changes

If you make a change that is likely to have a wide effect on the tree (such as a libc header change), you should run make checkbuild. A regular make will not build the entire tree; just the minimum number of projects that are required for the device. Tests, additional developer tools, and various other modules will not be built. Note that make checkbuild will not be complete either, as make tests covers a few additional modules, but generally speaking make checkbuild is enough.

Running the tests

The tests are all built from the tests/ directory.

Device tests

$ mma
$ adb remount
$ adb sync
$ adb shell /data/nativetest/bionic-unit-tests/bionic-unit-tests32
$ adb shell \
    /data/nativetest/bionic-unit-tests-static/bionic-unit-tests-static32
# Only for 64-bit targets
$ adb shell /data/nativetest64/bionic-unit-tests/bionic-unit-tests64
$ adb shell \
    /data/nativetest64/bionic-unit-tests-static/bionic-unit-tests-static64

Host tests

The host tests require that you have lunched either an x86 or x86_64 target.

$ mma
$ mm bionic-unit-tests-run-on-host32
$ mm bionic-unit-tests-run-on-host64  # For 64-bit *targets* only.

Against glibc

As a way to check that our tests do in fact test the correct behavior (and not just the behavior we think is correct), it is possible to run the tests against the host's glibc. The executables are already in your path.

$ mma
$ bionic-unit-tests-glibc32
$ bionic-unit-tests-glibc64

Gathering test coverage

For either host or target coverage, you must first:

  • $ export NATIVE_COVERAGE=true
    • Note that the build system is ignorant to this flag being toggled, i.e. if you change this flag, you will have to manually rebuild bionic.
  • Set bionic_coverage=true in libc/Android.mk and libm/Android.mk.

Coverage from device tests

$ mma
$ adb sync
$ adb shell \
    GCOV_PREFIX=/data/local/tmp/gcov \
    GCOV_PREFIX_STRIP=`echo $ANDROID_BUILD_TOP | grep -o / | wc -l` \
    /data/nativetest/bionic-unit-tests/bionic-unit-tests32
$ acov

acov will pull all coverage information from the device, push it to the right directories, run lcov, and open the coverage report in your browser.

Coverage from host tests

First, build and run the host tests as usual (see above).

$ croot
$ lcov -c -d $ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT -o coverage.info
$ genhtml -o covreport coverage.info # or lcov --list coverage.info

The coverage report is now available at covreport/index.html.

Attaching GDB to the tests

Bionic's test runner will run each test in its own process by default to prevent tests failures from impacting other tests. This also has the added benefit of running them in parallel, so they are much faster.

However, this also makes it difficult to run the tests under GDB. To prevent each test from being forked, run the tests with the flag --no-isolate.

32-bit ABI bugs

This probably belongs in the NDK documentation rather than here, but these are the known ABI bugs in the 32-bit ABI:

  • time_t is 32-bit. http://b/5819737. In the 64-bit ABI, time_t is 64-bit.

  • off_t is 32-bit. There is off64_t, and in newer releases there is almost-complete support for _FILE_OFFSET_BITS. Unfortunately our stdio implementation uses 32-bit offsets and -- worse -- function pointers to functions that use 32-bit offsets, so there's no good way to implement the last few pieces http://b/24807045. In the 64-bit ABI, off_t is off64_t.

  • sigset_t is too small on ARM and x86 (but correct on MIPS), so support for real-time signals is broken. http://b/5828899 In the 64-bit ABI, sigset_t is the correct size for every architecture.