[erlang-bugs] R16B01's monitor delivery is broken?

Björn-Egil Dahlberg egil@REDACTED
Thu Aug 1 20:22:12 CEST 2013


On 2013-08-01 19:59, Björn-Egil Dahlberg wrote:
>
> We have confirmed that this problem indeed exists and we think we 
> understand what is happening.
>
> The problem has a low probability of occurring, though obviously 
> reproducible, and pretty serious if it occurs.
>
> I won't go into too much details, but the uniqueness of the process 
> identifier can be compromised, i.e. it will not be unique. In essence 
> a process might get an identifier of an already terminated process (or 
> an already living one though I haven't confirmed that), the mapping is 
> then overwritten, and by inspecting this identifier it will look dead. 
> Signals or messages will not be sent since it is "dead" or sent to an 
> unsuspecting (wrong) process. The mappings of id's and process 
> pointers has become inconsistent. It's a bit more complicated than 
> that but in a nutshell that's what's happening.
>
> What is needed for this to occur? A wrapping of the entire 
> "free-list-ring" of identifiers (size of max processes) while one 
> thread is in progress of doing an atomic read, some shift and masking, 
> and then a write for creating an identifier. *Highly unlikely* but 
> definitely a race. I.e. while one thread is doing a read, shift/mask, 
> and write to memory the other threads has to create and terminate 
> 262144 processes (or whatever the limit is set to, but that is the 
> default)
I think I tried to simplify this explanation too much. The race occurs 
when the process is deleted and writes to the free-list and a new 
process is created which is 262144 "generations/spawns" after the 
deleted process and reads from the free-list in between the terminating 
process read-shift/mask-write. Anyway details .. it's a race.

>
> If the thread is scheduled out by the OS, or a hyperthread switch 
> occurs because of a mem-stall (we're dealing with membarriers here 
> after all so it might be a thing) between the read and write the 
> likelihood of an incident increases. Also, by lowering 
> max-process-limit in the system the likelihood increases.
>
> We think we have a solution for this and initial tests show no 
> evidence of uniqueness problem after the fix. I think we will have a 
> fix out in maint next week.
>
> Using R16B01 together with the "+P legacy" is a workaround for this 
> issue. The legacy option uses the old way and does not suffer from 
> this problem.
>
> Thank you Scott, and to the rest of you at Basho for reporting this.
>
> Regards,
> Björn-Egil
>
>
> On 2013-07-23 23:19, Björn-Egil Dahlberg wrote:
>> True, that seems suspicious.
>>
>> The vacation for Rickard is going great I think. Last I heard from 
>> him, he was diving round Öland (literally "island-land") in 
>> south-eastern sweden. It will be a few weeks before he's back.
>>
>> In the meanwhile it is fairly lonely here at OTP, today we were two 
>> persons at the office, and there is a lot of stuff to do. I will have 
>> a quick look at it and verify but will probably let Rickard deal with 
>> it when he comes back.
>>
>> Thanks for a great summary and drill down of the problem!
>>
>> Regards,
>> Björn-Egil
>>
>>
>> 2013/7/23 Scott Lystig Fritchie <fritchie@REDACTED 
>> <mailto:fritchie@REDACTED>>
>>
>>     Hi, everyone.  Hope your summer vacations are going well.  I have
>>     some
>>     bad news for Rickard, at least.
>>
>>         SHA:         e794251f8e54d6697e1bcc360471fd76b20c7748
>>         Author:      Rickard Green <rickard@REDACTED
>>     <mailto:rickard@REDACTED>>
>>         Date:        Thu May 30 2013 07:56:31 GMT-0500 (CDT)
>>         Subject: Merge branch 'rickard/ptab-id-alloc/OTP-11077' into
>>     maint
>>         Parent:      22685099ace9802016bf6203c525702084717d72
>>         Parent:      5c039a1fb4979314912dc3af6626d8d7a1c73993
>>         Merge branch 'rickard/ptab-id-alloc/OTP-11077' into maint
>>
>>         * rickard/ptab-id-alloc/OTP-11077:
>>           Introduce a better id allocation algorithm for PTabs
>>
>>     This commit appears to break monitor delivery?  And it may or may
>>     not be
>>     causing processes to die for reasons that we cannot see or
>>     understand.
>>
>>     Run with R15B03-1, the example code in test6.erl is merely slow:
>>
>>     https://gist.github.com/jtuple/aa4830a0ff0a94f69484/raw/02adc518e225f263a7e25d339ec7200ef2dda491/test6.erl
>>
>>     On my 4 core/8 HT core MacBook Pro, R15B03-1 cannot go above 200% CPU
>>     utilization, and the execution time is correspondingly slooow.
>>      But it
>>     appears to work correctly.
>>
>>         erl -eval '[begin io:format("Iteration ~p at ~p\n",
>>     [X,time()]), test6:go() end || X <- lists:seq(1, 240)].'
>>
>>     When run with R16B, it's *much* faster.  CPU utilization above 750%
>>     confirms that it's going faster.  And it appears to work correctly.
>>
>>     However, when run with R16B01, we see non-deterministic hangs on
>>     both OS
>>     X and various Linux platforms.  CPU consumption by the "beam.smp"
>>     process drops to 0, and the next cycle of the list comprehension
>>     never
>>     starts.
>>
>>     Thanks to the magic of Git, it's pretty clear that the commit
>>     above is
>>     broken.  The commit before it appears to work well (i.e., does not
>>     hang).
>>
>>         SHA:         22685099ace9802016bf6203c525702084717d72
>>         Author:      Anders Svensson <anders@REDACTED
>>     <mailto:anders@REDACTED>>
>>         Date:        Wed May 29 2013 11:46:10 GMT-0500 (CDT)
>>         Subject: Merge branch
>>     'anders/diameter/watchdog_function_clause/OTP-11115' into maint
>>
>>     Using R16B01 together with the "+P legacy" flag does not hang.
>>      But this
>>     problem has given us at Basho enough ... caution ... that we will be
>>     much more cautious about moving our app packaging from R15B* to
>>     R16B*.
>>
>>     Several seconds after CPU consumption drops to 0%, then I trigger the
>>     creation of a "erl_crash.dump" file using erlang:halt("bummer").
>>      If I
>>     look at that file, then the process "Spawned as:
>>     test6:do_work2/0" says
>>     that there are active unidirectional links (i.e., monitors), but
>>     there
>>     is one process on that list that does not have a corresponding
>>     "=proc:<pid.number.here>" entry in the dump ... which strongly
>>     suggests
>>     to me that the process is dead.  Using DTrace, I've been able to
>>     establish that the dead process is indeed alive at one time and
>>     has been
>>     scheduled & descheduled at least once.  So there are really two
>>     mysteries:
>>
>>     1. Why is one of the test6:indirect_proxy/1 processes dying
>>     unexpectedly?  (The monitor doesn't fire, SASL isn't logging any
>>     errors,
>>     etc.)
>>
>>     2. Why isn't a monitor message being delivered?
>>
>>     Many thanks to Joe Blomstedt, Evan Vigil-McClanahan, Andrew Thompson,
>>     Steve Vinoski, and Sean Cribbs for their sleuthing work.
>>
>>     -Scott
>>
>>     --- snip --- snip --- snip --- snip --- snip ---
>>
>>     R15B03 lock count analysis, FWIW:
>>
>>             lock     id  #tries  #collisions  collisions [%]  time
>>     [us]  duration [%]
>>            -----    --- ------- ------------ ---------------
>>     ---------- -------------
>>         proc_tab      1 1280032      1266133         98.9142 60642804
>>          557.0583
>>        run_queue      8 3617608        12874          0.3559   261722
>>            2.4042
>>      sys_tracers      1 1280042         6445          0.5035    19365
>>            0.1779
>>         pix_lock    256 4480284         1213          0.0271     9777
>>            0.0898
>>        timeofday      1  709955         1187          0.1672     3216
>>            0.0295
>>     [......]
>>
>>     --- snip --- snip --- snip --- snip --- snip ---
>>
>>     =proc:<0.29950.154>
>>     State: Waiting
>>     Spawned as: test6:do_work2/0
>>     Spawned by: <0.48.0>
>>     Started: Tue Jul 23 04:50:54 2013
>>     Message queue length: 0
>>     Number of heap fragments: 0
>>     Heap fragment data: 0
>>     Link list: [{from,<0.48.0>,#Ref<0.0.19.96773>},
>>     {to,<0.32497.154>,#Ref<0.0.19.96797>},
>>     {to,<0.1184.155>,#Ref<0.0.19.96796>},
>>     {to,<0.31361.154>,#Ref<0.0.19.96799>},
>>     {to,<0.32019.154>,#Ref<0.0.19.96801>},
>>     {to,<0.32501.154>,#Ref<0.0.19.96800>},
>>     {to,<0.1352.155>,#Ref<0.0.19.96803>},
>>     {to,<0.32415.154>,#Ref<0.0.19.96805>},
>>     {to,<0.504.155>,#Ref<0.0.19.96804>},
>>     {to,<0.87.155>,#Ref<0.0.19.96802>},
>>     {to,<0.776.155>,#Ref<0.0.19.96798>}]
>>     Reductions: 45
>>     Stack+heap: 233
>>     OldHeap: 0
>>     Heap unused: 155
>>     OldHeap unused: 0
>>     Memory: 3472
>>     Program counter: 0x000000001e1504d0 (test6:do_work2/0 + 184)
>>     CP: 0x0000000000000000 (invalid)
>>     arity = 0
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