pgsql: Improve our ability to detect bogus pointers passed to pfree et - Mailing list pgsql-committers

From Tom Lane
Subject pgsql: Improve our ability to detect bogus pointers passed to pfree et
Date
Msg-id E1ogc5z-001Eoo-Up@gemulon.postgresql.org
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-committers
Improve our ability to detect bogus pointers passed to pfree et al.

Commit c6e0fe1f2 was a shade too trusting that any pointer passed
to pfree, repalloc, etc will point at a valid chunk.  Notably,
passing a pointer that was actually obtained from malloc tended
to result in obscure assertion failures, if not worse.  (On FreeBSD
I've seen such mistakes take down the entire cluster, seemingly as
a result of clobbering shared memory.)

To improve matters, extend the mcxt_methods[] array so that it
has entries for every possible MemoryContextMethodID bit-pattern,
with the currently unassigned ID codes pointing to error-reporting
functions.  Then, fiddle with the ID assignments so that patterns
likely to be associated with bad pointers aren't valid ID codes.
In particular, we should avoid assigning bit patterns 000 (zeroed
memory) and 111 (wipe_mem'd memory).

It turns out that on glibc (Linux), malloc uses chunk headers that
have flag bits in the same place we keep MemoryContextMethodID,
and that the bit patterns 000, 001, 010 are the only ones we'll
see as long as the backend isn't threaded.  So we can have very
robust detection of pfree'ing a malloc-assigned block on that
platform, at least so long as we can refrain from using up those
ID codes.  On other platforms, we don't have such a good guarantee,
but keeping 000 reserved will be enough to catch many such cases.

While here, make GetMemoryChunkMethodID() local to mcxt.c, as there
seems no need for it to be exposed even in memutils_internal.h.

Patch by me, with suggestions from Andres Freund and David Rowley.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2910981.1665080361@sss.pgh.pa.us

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/80ef92675823f14b0dd15a50b31372e27773a1f5

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/utils/mmgr/mcxt.c         | 112 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
src/include/utils/memutils_internal.h |  40 +++++-------
2 files changed, 124 insertions(+), 28 deletions(-)


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