[Tcl-bugs] [ tcl-Bugs-1618411 ] TclpCheckStackSpace() fails on recent linux system

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Bugs item #1618411, was opened at 2006-12-18 13:44
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by mistachkin
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Category: 48. Threading
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Arkadiusz Miskiewicz (arekm)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: TclpCheckStackSpace() fails on recent linux system

Initial Comment:
tcl fail randomly with:
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)

this is Linux 2.6.16, glibc 2.5, x86_64 system, testing vanilla tcl 8.5 a5 configured as:
./configure --enable-threads

Note that --enable-threads seems to be needed to reproduce the problem. Also I needed to run tclsh via make call to reproduce the problem - direct running tclsh aaa.tcl didn't trigger it.

While tracking the problem with dgp@jabber we found that problem is in TclpCheckStackSpace() function.

Further investigation shows that that this function seem to be wrong on recent Linux/glibc systems where many things are randomized (see http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Randomization) and finally we found out that disabling memory address space randomization makes  TclpCheckStackSpace() pass:
sysctl -w kernel.randomize_va_space=0

Looks like  TclpCheckStackSpace() isn't ready for recent systems with randomization stuff (which means any recent linux distro).

Test case:
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ ls
aaa.tcl  Makefile
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ cat aaa.tcl
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ cat Makefile
test:
        tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
application-specific initialization failed: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
tclsh aaa.tcl > bbb.txt
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$     

with stack debugging:
[arekm@arm ~/tcl]$ make test
/home/users/arekm/tcl-test/bin/tclsh8.5 aaa.tcl
stack OVERFLOW  in:0x7fffffa9c4e4       out:0x7fffffa9c4e4      use:0000        max:F06E2000
application-specific initialization failed XXX: too many nested evaluations (infinite loop?)
stack OVERFLOW  in:0x7fffffa9c954       out:0x7fffffa9c4e4      use:0470        max:F06E2000


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>Comment By: Joe Mistachkin (mistachkin)
Date: 2006-12-19 19:53

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=113501
Originator: NO


I can help work on this; however, I have no box that can repro the issue.

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