Re: Consider exposing mmap_is_attached_or_noreserve

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

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On Feb 27 16:38, E. Madison Bray wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> A very technical request regarding Cygwin internals: In mmap.c there
> is a function mmap_is_attached_or_noreserve(void *addr, size_t len)
> which is called from Cygwin's exception handler in the case of a
> STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION.
> 
> This is called in case an access violation occurs in memory that was
> allocated with Cygwin's mmap() with the MAP_NORESERVE flag, and allows
> us to commit the relevant pages when they are accessed.
> 
> After a successful call of mmap_is_attached_or_noreserve(), the Cygwin
> exception handler returns with ExceptionContinueExecution.
> Unfortunately, if the application happens to have a Vectored Continue
> Handler registered which happens to do something in the case of
> STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION (see [1]) there is no obvious way to tell if
> we're handling this sort of case.
> 
> Normally this isn't too much of a problem: E.g. we could just check
> the address that caused the access violation and see if its status is
> now MEM_COMMIT (i.e. Cygwin ran its exception handler and all is
> good).  However, due to the bug described in [1], if an exception
> occurs in code running on a sigaltstack, the Cygwin exception handler
> isn't run.
> 
> This makes for a tricky to handle use case:  What if some code in a
> signal handler function tries to access uncommitted memory in a
> MAP_NORESERVE mmap?  It's probably an unusual, undesirable case, and I
> haven't personally encountered it *yet*, but I could imagine some
> cases where it might happen.
> 
> In order to handle such a case it might be nice if
> mmap_is_attached_or_noreserve were able to be called by user code,
> perhaps as a new cygwin_internal(...) call.  I'd happily provide a
> patch, but I fear this might be an X/Y problem that I'm not seeing.

Honestly, I'm not overly keen to expose this stuff.  Wouldn't it
make more sense to fix Cygwin's sigaltstack implementation to handle
these cases gracefully?  You're apparently not shy working with
Windows exception handling.  Patches more than welcome!  I'm not
happy not having found a solution to this problem :}


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Maintainer

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