On 11/26/2015 06:06 PM, Luke Deller wrote:

I have come across some dubious code in Objects/weakrefobject.c which looks 
like a bug to me, but wanted to run it past others.

This was discovered from looking at crash dumps from a multithreaded python app 
(using Python 2.7.9, but the same weakref code exists in 3.5 and hg tip).

The code that worries me is at the end of the "weakref_richcompare" function:

return PyObject_RichCompare(PyWeakref_GET_OBJECT(self),
                             PyWeakref_GET_OBJECT(other), op);

At this point the code has established that the referents are still alive, and 
it is trying to compare the referents.  However it has not acquired a strong 
reference to the referents, so I think it is possible for one of them to be 
deleted half way through this comparison.  This can lead to a crash, because 
PyObject_RichCompare assumes that the PyObject*'s it was passed will remain 
usable for the duration of the call.

The crashes I have seen involve data corruption consistent with one of these 
PyObject's being deleted and the memory reused for something else, eg:

00 python27!try_3way_compare+0x15 [objects\object.c @ 712]
01 python27!try_3way_to_rich_compare+0xb [objects\object.c @ 901]
02 python27!do_richcmp+0x2c [objects\object.c @ 935]
03 python27!PyObject_RichCompare+0x99 [objects\object.c @ 982]
04 python27!weakref_richcompare+0x6a [objects\weakrefobject.c @ 212]

(In this example v->ob_type was 0x5f637865 which is ASCII "exc_", not a valid 
pointer at all)

Other places in weakrefobject.c seem to have a similar weakness, eg in 
weakref_hash and weakref_repr.

I have not been able to produce a small test case to exhibit this crash, but 
from this inspection of the code it looks like a bug - am I understanding this 
correctly?

Luke, go ahead and open an issue on the bug tracker [1] for this; email threads are too easily lost.

--
~Ethan~


[1] bugs.python.org

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