Hi Fabrizio,

I see you're getting some issues with the fact that mmap calls malloc() for its 
underlying reservation allocation. You're correct: it should not be doing this, 
and ideally there should be an object cache involved in here to handle 
allocation of metadata objects needed by the virtual memory management 
implementation.

Please wait a while and there should be a patch out soon to hopefully resolve 
this.

--
Kofi Doku Atuah
Kernel engineer
DATA61 | CSIRO

________________________________
From: Devel <[email protected]> on behalf of Fabrizio Bertocci 
<[email protected]>
Sent: 26 July 2017 07:34
To: [email protected]
Subject: [seL4] Recursive call to malloc crash system

Hi all,
I have a system configured to use dynamic heap through the vspace. I'm working 
with 5.2.0 and using pc99 simulator through qemu.

Everything is occurring in the root task, as I haven't even completed my 
bootstrapping code.

In this configuration, whenever my code calls malloc() and there is a low 
memory condition (where there is not enough space on the heap to fulfill my 
request), malloc() end up calling __expand_heap().

Here it first attempts to expand the heap through brk syscall, then if fails 
uses mmap() to attempt to get more pages from the virtual memory.

In both cases (brk and mmap) end up calling a function in the vspace that 
attempts to make available new pages.
Unfortunately the code in the libself4utils/src/vspace/vspace.c, end up calling 
malloc() for the sel4utils_res structure.

As you expect, we are already in a no-memory condition, so a subsequent call to 
malloc() might  end up calling __expand_heap() and so on...  (depending on the 
bytes  left on the heap, this nested malloc might succeed if the initial block 
was larger than the size of sel4utils_res structure).

So, everything loops until the whole system crash because of stack overflow.

Why vspace uses malloc() to dynamically allocate those structures, causing the 
whole system to fail?

To test, I have changed the implementation in vspace.c to use a static buffer 
pool, and it seems it solve my issue, but am I doing something wrong in the 
bootstrap code ?

Any help is appreciated,
Regards,
Fabrizio Bertocci
Real-Time Innovations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA


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