Ryan O'Hara reported that haproxy breaks on fedora-32 using gcc-10
(pre-release). It turns out that constructs such as:
while (item != head) {
item = LIST_ELEM(item.n);
}
loop forever, never matching <item> to <head> despite a printf there
showing them equal. In practice the problem is that the LIST_ELEM()
macro is wrong, it assigns the subtract of two pointers (an integer)
to another pointer through a cast to its pointer type. And GCC 10 now
considers that this cannot match a pointer and silently optimizes the
comparison away. A tested workaround for this is to build with
-fno-tree-pta. Note that older gcc versions even with -ftree-pta do
not exhibit this rather surprizing behavior.
This patch changes the test to instead cast the null-based address to
an int to get the offset and subtract it from the pointer, and this
time it works. There were just a few places to adjust. Ideally
offsetof() should be used but the LIST_ELEM() API doesn't make this
trivial as it's commonly called with a typeof(ptr) and not typeof(ptr*)
thus it would require to completely change the whole API, which is not
something workable in the short term, especially for a backport.
With this change, the emitted code is subtly different even on older
versions. A code size reduction of ~600 bytes and a total executable
size reduction of ~1kB are expected to be observed and should not be
taken as an anomaly. Typically this loop in dequeue_proxy_listeners() :
while ((listener = MT_LIST_POP(...)))
used to produce this code where the comparison is performed on RAX
while the new offset is assigned to RDI even though both are always
identical:
53ded8: 48 8d 78 c0 lea -0x40(%rax),%rdi
53dedc: 48 83 f8 40 cmp $0x40,%rax
53dee0: 74 39 je 53df1b <dequeue_proxy_listeners+0xab>
and now produces this one which is slightly more efficient as the
same register is used for both purposes:
53dd08: 48 83 ef 40 sub $0x40,%rdi
53dd0c: 74 2d je 53dd3b <dequeue_proxy_listeners+0x9b>
Similarly, retrieving the channel from a stream_interface using si_ic()
and si_oc() used to cause this (stream-int in rdi):
1cb7: c7 47 1c 00 02 00 00 movl $0x200,0x1c(%rdi)
1cbe: f6 47 04 10 testb $0x10,0x4(%rdi)
1cc2: 74 1c je 1ce0 <si_report_error+0x30>
1cc4: 48 81 ef 00 03 00 00 sub $0x300,%rdi
1ccb: 81 4f 10 00 08 00 00 orl $0x800,0x10(%rdi)
and now causes this:
1cb7: c7 47 1c 00 02 00 00 movl $0x200,0x1c(%rdi)
1cbe: f6 47 04 10 testb $0x10,0x4(%rdi)
1cc2: 74 1c je 1ce0 <si_report_error+0x30>
1cc4: 81 8f 10 fd ff ff 00 orl $0x800,-0x2f0(%rdi)
There is extremely little chance that this fix wakes up a dormant bug as
the emitted code effectively does what the source code intends.
This must be backported to all supported branches (dropping MT_LIST_ELEM
and the spoa_example parts as needed), since the bug is subtle and may
not always be visible even when compiling with gcc-10.
Willy Tarreau
Joseph Herlant
Eric Salama