[llvm-dev] call_once and TSan

[Kuba Brecka via llvm-dev]

> On 2 Sep 2016, at 11:18, Dmitry Vyukov via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:30 PM, Kuba Brecka <kuba.brecka at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm trying to write a TSan interceptor for the C++11 call_once function.  There are currently false positive reports, because the inner __call_once function is located in the (non-instrumented) libcxx library, and on macOS we can't expect the users to build their own instrumented libcxx.
>> 
>> TSan already supports pthread_once and dispatch_once by having interceptors that re-implement the logic.  However, doing the same for call_once/__call_once doesn't work, because call_once is explicitly supposed to be exception-safe, but the sanitizer runtime libraries disallow exception handling.
>> 
>> Any ideas how to handle call_once in TSan?
> 
> Does anybody remember exact reasons we disable exceptions in sanitizer
> runtimes? One is that it won't link with C programs. Are there any
> other?
> If C is the only reason: there is already a part of tsan runtime is
> linked only to C++ programs (it contains operator new/delete
> interceptors). We could add additional files to the cxx part of
> runtime and build them with exceptions.
> 
> Alternatively, the interceptor can handle only synchronization but
> forward actual logic to the real function. Along the lines of:
> 
> INTERCEPTOR(call_once, o) {
>  __tsan_acquire_release(o);
>  REAL(call_once)(o);
> }
> 
> That will have some performance impact. If we hardcode the "fully
> initialized" value, then we can eliminate the additional overhead:
> 
> INTERCEPTOR(call_once, o) {
>  if (__atomic_load(o, acquire) == FULLY_INITIALIZED) {
>     __tsan_acquire(o);
>     return;
>  }
>  __tsan_acquire_release(o);
>  REAL(call_once)(o);
> }

Unfortunately, the first fast-path check is inlined and cannot be intercepted.  We can only intercept the inner call to __call_once.  But how would __tsan_acquire_release help here?  The issue is that we need to perform the release *after* user code has run, but before the "o" flag is changed.  Otherwise, TSan will still see a false positive where one thread has already run user code, and another thread already sees that call_once is finished, but the acquire has no release to pair with.

Kuba