This is the mail archive of the
libc-alpha@sourceware.org
mailing list for the glibc project.
Re: The direction of malloc?
- From: Will Newton <will dot newton at linaro dot org>
- To: "Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>
- Cc: Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at redhat dot com>, "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at redhat dot com>, GNU C Library <libc-alpha at sourceware dot org>, Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>, Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot com>, Andreas Schwab <schwab at suse dot de>, Ondřej Bílka <neleai at seznam dot cz>
- Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 17:24:59 +0000
- Subject: Re: The direction of malloc?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <52A6A0DA dot 1080109 at redhat dot com> <CANu=Dmi32gwk-hQ3dDbj0d4_gs3FWqt02+NmveXH1p03Vm+Mfg at mail dot gmail dot com> <20131210111031 dot GH5048 at spoyarek dot pnq dot redhat dot com> <Pine dot LNX dot 4 dot 64 dot 1312101654500 dot 15324 at digraph dot polyomino dot org dot uk>
On 10 December 2013 17:00, Joseph S. Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2013, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
>
>> A really cool feature would be to have the ability to plug in malloc
>> implementations at least at build time in the beginning and then later
>> at runtime using tunables. It should be doable by implementing a
>> layer that passes calls on to the selected implementation. This would
>> have to be implemented using relocation (IFUNC?) since otherwise we're
>> introducing an additional cost.
>
> Applications can always provide their own malloc, as can an LD_PRELOAD
> library; calls from libc to malloc functions should already go through the
> PLT so as to get any replacement malloc.
>
> One significant difficulty with building a replacement into glibc is
> supporting malloc_set_state calls with data saved with a previous glibc
> version - the problem that has so far prevented us from correcting malloc
> alignment for powerpc32 without breaking emacs (bug 6527 - as noted in
> that bug, it should be fixed for 32-bit x86 as well to support ISO C
> extensions such as _Decimal128 properly, if a way to fix it is found).
Is that actually possible? I thought malloc_get_state just returned an
opaque pointer so I wasn't aware it could be written out to any kind
of storage or last longer than the lifetime of a process.
--
Will Newton
Toolchain Working Group, Linaro