[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] RFC: Replacing the default CRT allocator on Windows

Tue Jul 7 14:14:53 PDT 2020

+Kostya Kortchinsky <kostyak at google.com>

w.r.t the licensing problem of a new allocator - have you considered using
Scudo? The version in compiler-rt *is* the upstream (and thus fully
licensed with LLVM), and it's what we use as the production allocator in
Android. The docs <https://llvm.org/docs/ScudoHardenedAllocator.html> are a
little out of date (see the source code in //compiler-rt/lib/scudo/
*standalone* for the bleeding edge), and it doesn't support Windows out of
the box currently - but there have been some successful experiments
<https://reviews.llvm.org/D42519> to get it working. I don't imagine that
getting full support would be more challenging than setting some sort of
frankenbuild up. From Kostya (who maintains Scudo), "I don't think the port
is going to be a lot of effort".

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 2:03 PM Mitch Phillips <mitchp at google.com> wrote:

> Bearing in mind that the ASan allocator isn't particularly suited to
> detecting memory corruption unless you compile LLVM/Clang with ASan
> instrumentation as well. I don't imagine anybody would be proposing making
> the debug build for Windows be ASan-ified by default.
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 1:49 PM Adrian McCarthy via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Asan and the Debug CRT take different approaches, but the problems they
>> cover largely overlap.
>>
>> Both help with detection of errors like buffer overrun, double free, use
>> after free, etc.  Asan generally gives you more immediate feedback on
>> those, but you pay a higher price in performance.  Debug CRT lets you do
>> some trade off between the performance hit and how soon it detects problems.
>>
>> Asan documentation says leak detection is experimental on Windows, while
>> the Debug CRT leak detection is mature and robust (and can be nearly
>> automatic in debug builds).  By adding a couple calls, you can do finer
>> grained leak detection than checking what remains when the program exits.
>>
>> Debug CRT lets you hook all of the malloc calls if you want, so you can
>> extend it for your own types of tracking and bug detection.  But I don't
>> think that feature is often used.
>>
>> Windows's Appverifier is cool and powerful.  I cannot remember for sure,
>> but I think some of its features might depend on the Debug CRT.  One thing
>> it can do is simulate allocation failures so you can test your program's
>> recovery code, but most programs nowadays assume memory allocation never
>> fails and will just crash if it ever does.
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 10:25 AM Zachary Turner via llvm-dev <
>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Note that ASAN support is present on Windows now.  Does the Debug CRT
>>> provide any features that are not better served by ASAN?
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 9:44 AM Chris Tetreault via llvm-dev <
>>> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> For release builds, I think this is fine. However for debug builds, the
>>>> Windows allocator provides a lot of built-in functionality for debugging
>>>> memory issues that I would be very sad to lose. Therefore, I would request
>>>> that:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>    1. This be added as a configuration option to either select the new
>>>>    allocator or the windows allocator
>>>>    2. The Windows allocator be used by default in debug builds
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ideally, since you’re doing this work, you’d implement it in such a way
>>>> that it’s fairly easy for anybody to use whatever allocator they want when
>>>> building LLVM (on any platform, not just windows), and it’s not just
>>>> hardcoded to system allocator vs whatever allocator ends up getting added.
>>>> However, as long as I can use the windows debug allocator I’m happy.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>>    Christopher Tetreault
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *From:* cfe-dev <cfe-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org> *On Behalf Of *Alexandre
>>>> Ganea via cfe-dev
>>>> *Sent:* Wednesday, July 1, 2020 9:20 PM
>>>> *To:* cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org; LLVM Dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
>>>> *Subject:* [EXT] [cfe-dev] RFC: Replacing the default CRT allocator on
>>>> Windows
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I was wondering how folks were feeling about replacing the default
>>>> Windows CRT allocator in Clang, LLD and other LLVM tools possibly.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The CRT heap allocator on Windows doesn’t scale well on large core
>>>> count machines. Any multi-threaded workload in LLVM that allocates often is
>>>> impacted by this. As a result, link times with ThinLTO are extremely slow
>>>> on Windows. We’re observing performance inversely proportional to the
>>>> number of cores. The more cores the machines has, the slower ThinLTO
>>>> linking gets.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We’ve replaced the CRT heap allocator by modern lock-free thread-cache
>>>> allocators such as rpmalloc (unlicence), mimalloc (MIT licence) or snmalloc
>>>> (MIT licence). The runtime performance is an order of magnitude faster.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Time to link clang.exe with LLD and -flto on 36-core:
>>>>
>>>>   Windows CRT heap allocator: 38 min 47 sec
>>>>
>>>>   mimalloc: 2 min 22 sec
>>>>
>>>>   rpmalloc: 2 min 15 sec
>>>>
>>>>   snmalloc: 2 min 19 sec
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We’re running in production with a downstream fork of LLVM + rpmalloc
>>>> for more than a year. However when cross-compiling some specific game
>>>> platforms we’re using other downstream forks of LLVM that we can’t change.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Two questions arise:
>>>>
>>>>    1. The licencing. Should we embed one of these allocators into the
>>>>    LLVM tree, or keep them separate out-of-the-tree?
>>>>    2. If the answer for above question is “yes”, given the tremendous
>>>>    performance speedup, should we embed one of these allocators into Clang/LLD
>>>>    builds by default? (on Windows only) Considering that Windows doesn’t have
>>>>    a LD_PRELOAD mechanism.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Please see demo patch here: https://reviews.llvm.org/D71786
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thank you in advance for the feedback!
>>>>
>>>> Alex.
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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