perf annotate SEGVs

From: Anton Blanchard
Date: Fri Feb 12 2010 - 03:19:14 EST



Hi,

I think I understand a problem in perf annotate where I see random corruption
(rb tree issues, glibc malloc failures etc).

The issue happens with zero length symbols, in this particular case they
are kernel functions written entirely in assembly, eg .copy_4K_page,
.__copy_tofrom_user and .memcpy:

Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
63516: c00000000004a774 212 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .devm_ioremap_prot
69095: c00000000004a848 0 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .copy_4K_page
62002: c00000000004aa00 0 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .__copy_tofrom_user
50576: c00000000004b000 0 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .memcpy
69557: c00000000004b278 176 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .copy_in_user
51841: c00000000004b328 144 FUNC GLOBAL DEFAULT 1 .copy_to_user

In symbol_filter we look at the length of each symbol:

static int symbol_filter(struct map *map __used, struct symb
...
const int size = (sizeof(*priv->hist) +
(sym->end - sym->start) * sizeof(u64));

And since start == end we create 0 bytes of space for the ip[] array.

Later on in hist_hit we then start indexing off this array:

h->ip[offset]++;

Which then corrupts whatever is next in memory. With large assembly functions
we corrupt a lot :)

How should we fix this? Do we need to do a first pass through our symbols
to fixup ->end before allocating the ->ip[] arrays?

Anton
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