On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 05:51:24AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
> I suspect this is a race in LSan caused by a thread calling exit() while
> other threads are spawning. Here's my theory.
>
> When a thread is spawned, LSan needs to know where its stack is (so it
> can look for points to reachable memory). It calls pthread_getattr_np(),
> which gets an attributes object that must be cleaned up with
> pthread_attr_destroy(). Presumably it does this shortly after. But
> there's a race window where that attr object is allocated and we haven't
> yet set up the new thread's info. If another thread calls exit() then,
> LSan will run but its book-keeping will be in an inconsistent state.
Thanks for digging. I agree with your theory, and am annoyed with how
clever it is ;-).
> So it's a pretty easy fix, though I don't love it in general. Every
> place that spawns multiple threads that can die() would need the same
> treatment. And this isn't a "real" leak in any reasonable sense; it only
> happens because we're exiting the program directly, at which point all
> of the memory is returned to the OS anyway. So I hate changing
> production code to satisfy a leak-checking false positive.
>
> OTOH, dealing with false positives is annoying for humans, and the
> run-time cost should be negligible. We can work around this one, and
> avoid making the same change in other spots unless somebody sees a racy
> failure in practice.
Yeah... I share your thoughts here as well. It's kind of gross that we
have to touch production code purely to appease the leak checker, but I
think that the trade-off is worth it since:
- the false positives are annoying to diagnose (as you said, and as
evidenced by the time that you, Junio, and myself have sunk into
discussing this ;-)).
- the run-time cost is negligible.
So I think that this is a good change to make, and I'm happy to see it
go through. I don't think we should necessarily try too hard to find all
spots that might benefit from a similar change, and instead just apply
the same treatment if/when we notice false positives in CI.
Thanks,
Taylor
