Re: perf per-symbol histogram causes memory corruption

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Thu Feb 25 2010 - 06:12:10 EST



(Added Arnaldo to the Cc: - he's maintaining the symbol lookup bits of perf.)

* David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> When builtin-annotate.c processes sample events via
> process_sample_event() it uses 'sample_filter'
>
> sample_filter() sizes the histogram object for a symbol based upon the
> size, calculated as "sym->end - sym->start", to determine the number
> of IP sample slots to allocate.
>
> The problem is, the sym->end value is not stable at this point.
>
> For example, dso__load_sym() first loads all of the symbols, then it
> makes another pass over the symbols by calling symbols__fixup_end()
> which will adjust the sym->end values of various symbols.
>
> At this point, the histogram IP sample array allocated by
> sample_filter() can become too small, and hits recorded can thus
> access past the end of the array corrupting memory.
>
> I get this very reliably on sparc64, and it took me a few days to root
> cause this. :-)
>
> I don't see an immediate way to fix this, any ideas?
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/