HAProxy - Load balancer
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Willy Tarreau ecc473b529 BUG/MAJOR: compiler: relax alignment constraints on certain structures
In github bug #1517, Mike Lothian reported instant crashes on startup
on RHEL8 + gcc-11 that appeared with 2.4 when allocating a proxy.

The analysis brought us down to the THREAD_ALIGN() entries that were
placed inside the "server" struct to avoid false sharing of cache lines.
It turns out that some modern gcc make use of aligned vector operations
to manipulate some fields (e.g. memset() etc) and that these structures
allocated using malloc() are not necessarily aligned, hence the crash.

The compiler is allowed to do that because the structure claims to be
aligned. The problem is in fact that the alignment propagates to other
structures that embed it. While most of these structures are used as
statically allocated variables, some are dynamic and cannot use that.
A deeper analysis showed that struct server does this, propagates to
struct proxy, which propagates to struct spoe_config, all of which
are allocated using malloc/calloc.

A better approach would consist in usins posix_memalign(), but this one
is not available everywhere and will either need to be reimplemented
less efficiently (by always wasting 64 bytes before the area), or a
few functions will have to be specifically written to deal with the
few structures that are dynamically allocated.

But the deeper problem that remains is that it is difficult to track
structure alignment, as there's no available warning to check this.
For the long term we'll probably have to create a macro such as
"struct_malloc()" etc which takes a type and enforces an alignment
based on the one of this type. This also means propagating that to
pools as well, and it's not a tiny task.

For now, let's get rid of the forced alignment in struct server, and
replace it with extra padding. By punching 63-byte holes, we can keep
areas on separate cache lines. Doing so moderately increases the size
of the "server" structure (~+6%) but that's the best short-term option
and it's easily backportable.

This will have to be backported as far as 2.4.

Thanks to Mike for the detailed report.
2022-01-27 16:28:10 +01:00
.github CI: github actions: use cache for SSL libs 2022-01-25 12:02:08 +01:00
addons BUILD: opentracing: display warning in case of using OT_USE_VARS at compile time 2021-12-28 14:51:40 +01:00
admin OPTIM: halog: skip fields 64 bits at a time when supported 2021-11-08 12:08:26 +01:00
dev Revert "DEV: coccinelle: Add rule to use chunk_istcat() instead of chunk_strncat()" 2021-11-08 13:42:03 +01:00
doc DEBUG: pools: add new build option DEBUG_POOL_TRACING 2022-01-24 16:40:48 +01:00
examples MEDIUM: proxy: remove long-broken 'option http_proxy' 2021-07-18 19:35:32 +02:00
include BUG/MAJOR: compiler: relax alignment constraints on certain structures 2022-01-27 16:28:10 +01:00
reg-tests REGTESTS: ssl: Fix ssl_errors regtest with OpenSSL 1.0.2 2022-01-11 20:02:37 +01:00
scripts CI: refactor OpenTracing build script 2022-01-19 07:37:40 +01:00
src DEBUG: lru: use a xorshift generator in the testing code 2022-01-27 16:28:10 +01:00
tests CLEANUP: assorted typo fixes in the code and comments 2021-08-16 12:37:59 +02:00
.cirrus.yml CI: introduce scripts/build-vtest.sh for installing VTest 2021-05-18 10:48:30 +02:00
.gitattributes MINOR: Configure the cpp userdiff driver for *.[ch] in .gitattributes 2021-02-22 18:17:57 +01:00
.gitignore DOC: lua-api: Add documentation about lua filters 2021-08-15 20:56:44 +02:00
.mailmap DOC: update Tim's address in .mailmap 2021-09-16 09:14:14 +02:00
.travis.yml CI: travis-ci: temporarily disable arm64 builds 2021-08-07 07:28:15 +02:00
BRANCHES DOC: fix some spelling issues over multiple files 2021-01-08 14:53:47 +01:00
CHANGELOG [RELEASE] Released version 2.6-dev0 2021-11-23 15:50:11 +01:00
CONTRIBUTING CLEANUP: assorted typo fixes in the code and comments 2021-08-16 12:37:59 +02:00
INSTALL MINOR: version: it's development again 2021-11-23 15:48:35 +01:00
LICENSE LICENSE: add licence exception for OpenSSL 2012-09-07 13:52:26 +02:00
MAINTAINERS CONTRIB: move spoa_example out of the tree 2021-04-21 09:39:06 +02:00
Makefile DEBUG: pools: add new build option DEBUG_POOL_TRACING 2022-01-24 16:40:48 +01:00
README DOC: create a BRANCHES file to explain the life cycle 2019-06-15 22:00:14 +02:00
ROADMAP DOC: update the outdated ROADMAP file 2019-06-15 21:59:54 +02:00
SUBVERS BUILD: use format tags in VERDATE and SUBVERS files 2013-12-10 11:22:49 +01:00
VERDATE [RELEASE] Released version 2.5.0 2021-11-23 15:40:21 +01:00
VERSION [RELEASE] Released version 2.6-dev0 2021-11-23 15:50:11 +01:00

The HAProxy documentation has been split into a number of different files for
ease of use.

Please refer to the following files depending on what you're looking for :

  - INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install HAProxy
  - BRANCHES to understand the project's life cycle and what version to use
  - LICENSE for the project's license
  - CONTRIBUTING for the process to follow to submit contributions

The more detailed documentation is located into the doc/ directory :

  - doc/intro.txt for a quick introduction on HAProxy
  - doc/configuration.txt for the configuration's reference manual
  - doc/lua.txt for the Lua's reference manual
  - doc/SPOE.txt for how to use the SPOE engine
  - doc/network-namespaces.txt for how to use network namespaces under Linux
  - doc/management.txt for the management guide
  - doc/regression-testing.txt for how to use the regression testing suite
  - doc/peers.txt for the peers protocol reference
  - doc/coding-style.txt for how to adopt HAProxy's coding style
  - doc/internals for developer-specific documentation (not all up to date)