cd70a7856b
- CI merge issues:
- The malloc shim libraries are renamed.
- CMake gets very unhappy if you don't enable the C language and
tries to link with the C compiler instead of the C++ compiler if
you do enable it.
- The Ubuntu packages for QEMU install a `binfmt_misc` activator for
PowerPC64 little-endian, but set the page size to 4 KiB. We then
tried to run the tests (which expect 64 KiB pages) and became very
confused when `mmap` returned 4 KiB-aligned memory.
- Test failures:
- Fix all of the issues UBsan found.
- Underflow in `pointer_offset` when used to add negative offsets.
- `CoreAlloc`'s `LocalState` accessed on a null `CoreAlloc` pointer.
- Out of bounds access in the sizeclass list on attempts to access
more memory than fits in the VA space.
-
- There was an integer overflow in `AddressSpace` that could cause it
to try to allocate a zero-sized object, get a null pointer, and
then try to do something with 0 - {size of the real allocation}.
- The malloc tests weren't setting `errno` to 0 before doing
calling `malloc`, which should set `errno` on failure, and then
checking that `errno` was 0.
- Don't call `PAL::error` on PAL allocation failure, return `nullptr`.
The PALs were inconsistent about that and the new code expects to be
able to report address-space exhaustion.
- The malloc checks can behave differently with 0-sized allocations
on different platforms but were very fragile about their
expectations.
- The malloc test didn't report failure for all of the ways that it
could fail and so was spuriously passing on some platforms.
- The perf test for external pointer is currently very slow on
Windows. The number of loops have been reduced and a timeout added
for the Windows CI runs.
- The logic to capture `errno` across calls was using
`decltype(errno)`, which on some platforms where `errno` is a macro
evaluated to `int&` and so they captured a reference rather than
the value and failed to reset `errno`.
- The Apple PAL can set `errno` on `notify_using` if it's called with
memory that was not previously passed to `notify_not_using` but was
not adequately protected against this and so would sometimes cause
`malloc` to set `errno` to `EINVAL`.
snmalloc
snmalloc is a high-performance allocator.
snmalloc can be used directly in a project as a header-only C++ library,
it can be LD_PRELOADed on Elf platforms (e.g. Linux, BSD),
and there is a crate to use it from Rust.
Its key design features are:
- Memory that is freed by the same thread that allocated it does not require any synchronising operations.
- Freeing memory in a different thread to initially allocated it, does not take any locks and instead uses a novel message passing scheme to return the memory to the original allocator, where it is recycled. This enables 1000s of remote deallocations to be performed with only a single atomic operation enabling great scaling with core count.
- The allocator uses large ranges of pages to reduce the amount of meta-data required.
- The fast paths are highly optimised with just two branches on the fast path for malloc (On Linux compiled with Clang).
- The platform dependencies are abstracted away to enable porting to other platforms.
snmalloc's design is particular well suited to the following two difficult scenarios that can be problematic for other allocators:
- Allocations on one thread are freed by a different thread
- Deallocations occur in large batches
Both of these can cause massive reductions in performance of other allocators, but do not for snmalloc.
Comprehensive details about snmalloc's design can be found in the accompanying paper, and differences between the paper and the current implementation are described here. Since writing the paper, the performance of snmalloc has improved considerably.
Further documentation
Contributing
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This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.