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Assignment 1: Debugging memory allocator

Goal

C allows users to allocate and free memory explicitly. This means that we can write fast code for modern machines, because we have full control over memory. But, depressingly, it means that we can easily crash our programs.

C gives pain; it can also take pain away. We can build tools to help us debug memory allocation problems. For instance, we can write a debugging memory allocator.

Task

Write a debugging malloc library that helps track and debug memory usage, and that catches memory errors in our handout programs (and other programs).

Sign up for code.seas here, and then download the code here: https://code.seas.harvard.edu/cs61/cs61-psets

The handout code for this pset is in the cs61-psets/pset1 directory. This contains a skeleton memory allocator, which just calls malloc and free, and many test programs.

Your code for this problem set will go in m61.c. Run make check or make check-all to check your work. make check stops at the first error; make check-all runs all tests.

Context

C memory allocation uses two basic functions, malloc and free.

void *malloc(size_t size) Allocates size bytes of memory and return a pointer to the dynamically allocated memory. This memory is not initialized (it can contain anything). Returns NULL if the allocation failed (because size was too big, or memory is exhausted, or for whatever other reason).

void free(void *ptr) Frees a single block of memory previously allocated by malloc.

The rules of malloc and free are simple: Allocate once, then free once.

These errors are called invalid frees. The third error is also called a double free.

Some notes on boundary cases:

Two secondary memory allocation functions are also commonly used in C, calloc and realloc. The calloc function allocates memory and clears it to zero. The realloc function can allocate, free, or resize memory depending on its arguments. We can write these functions like so:

 void *calloc(size_t nmemb, size_t sz) {
     void *ptr = malloc(sz * nmemb);
     if (ptr != NULL)
         memset(ptr, 0, sz * nmemb);     // clear memory to 0
     return ptr;
 }

 void *realloc(void *ptr, size_t sz) {
     void *new_ptr = NULL;
     if (sz != 0)
         new_ptr = malloc(sz);
     if (ptr != NULL && new_ptr != NULL) {
         size_t old_sz = `**`size of memory block allocated at ptr`**`;
         if (old_sz < sz)
             memcpy(new_ptr, ptr, old_sz);
         else
             memcpy(new_ptr, ptr, sz);
     }
     free(ptr);
     return new_ptr;
 }

You will work on our replacements for these functions, which are called m61_malloc, m61_free, m61_calloc, and m61_realloc. Our versions of these functions simply call the system versions. Note that the m61 functions take extra arguments that the system versions don’t, namely a filename and a line number. Our header file, m61.h, uses macros to supply these arguments automatically. You’ll use filenames and line numbers to track where memory was allocated and to report where errors occur.

Assignment

Your debugging allocator must support the following functionality. Our handout code contains tests for all this functionality (though we may run other tests when grading).

  1. Overall statistics.
  2. Secondary allocation functions and integer overflow protection.
  3. Invalid free detection.
  4. Boundary write error detection.
  5. Memory leak reporting.
  6. Advanced reports and checking.

This functionality is ordered from easier to harder. We encourage students to try at least this functionality on their own. Our solution involves tens of lines of code (not hundreds), which is modest, but doing the work yourself will teach you a lot.

In addition to the debugging allocator, you must design and implement more useful functionality, namely heavy hitter reports. We want you to design your solution, implement it, and test it.

The grading breakdown:

Timing

This assignment serves several purposes for us and for you.

We are instituting a graduated handin process to serve all these purposes, and to ensure you get started on the pset early. Only the last turnin will be graded but we may look at every turnin.

  1. First, every student should commit and upload their work on the initial, statistics part by Friday 9/13. Try to do this work on your own. Your m61 should pass at least tests test001.c through test005.c. (test012.c is not that hard either.)
  2. Second, every student or student group should commit and upload a version of their work on the debugging allocator by Friday 9/20. Try to get through as many m61 tests as you can by this date.
  3. Third, every student or student group should commit and upload their final version, including heavy hitters, by Friday 9/27. Only the grade from this version will count.

It is important to get started early—this problem set is not trivial even though you don’t have to write that much code to make it work.

Debugging allocator (70%)

Statistics

Implement the following function:

void m61_getstatistics(struct m61_statistics *stats) Fill in the stats structure with overall statistics about memory allocations so far.

The m61_statistics structure is defined like this:

struct m61_statistics {
    unsigned long long nactive;           // number of active allocations [#malloc - #free]
    unsigned long long active_size;       // number of bytes in active allocations
    unsigned long long ntotal;            // number of allocations, total
    unsigned long long total_size;        // number of bytes in allocations, total
    unsigned long long nfail;             // number of failed allocation attempts
    unsigned long long fail_size;         // number of bytes in failed allocation attempts
};

Many of these statistics are quite easy to track. The hard one is active_size, which requires that your free(ptr) implementation determine the number of bytes allocated for ptr.

There are several ways you could accomplish this goal. For instance, you could create a list or hash table size_for_pointer that mapped pointer values to sizes. Your malloc code would add an entry to this data structure. Your free code would check this table and then remove the entry.

The easiest, and probably best, way is for your malloc code to allocate more space than the user requested. The first part of that space is used to store metadata about the allocated chunk, including its size. Your malloc will initialize this metadata, and then return a pointer to the payload, which is the space following the metadata. This calculation involves simple address arithmetic. Your free code then will take the payload pointer as input, and then use address arithmetic to calculate the pointer to the metadata. From that metadata it can read the size. See CS:APP2e Figure 9.35 “Format of a simple heap block” for an example of this type of layout.

Other aspects of the problem set will require you to add more stuff to the metadata.

Run make check to test your work. Test programs test001.c through test006.c test your overall statistics functionality. Open one of these programs and look at its code. You will notice some comments at the end of the file, such as this:

//! malloc count: active          0   total          0   fail          0
//! malloc size:  active          0   total          0   fail          0

These lines define the expected output for the test. The compare.pl script checks your actual output against the expected output and reports any discrepancies.

Secondary allocation functions, integer overflow protection

Your debugging malloc library should support the secondary allocation functions calloc and realloc. It also needs to be robust against integer overflow attacks. (See, for example CS:APP2e Aside “Security vulnerability in the XDR library”, in section 2.3, p91.)

Our handout code’s m61_calloc and m61_free functions are close, but they don’t quite work. Fix them, and fix any other integer overflow errors you find.

Test programs test007.c through test010.c check your work.

Invalid free and double-free detection

m61_free(ptr, file, line) should print an error message and then call C’s abort() function when ptr does not point to active dynamically-allocated memory.

Some things to watch:

MEMORY BUG: test011.c:9: invalid free of pointer 0x7fff683fab8c, not in heap

Test programs test011.c through test017.c check your work.

Boundary write error detection

A boundary error is when a program reads or writes memory beyond the actual dimensions of an allocated memory block. An example boundary write error is to write the 11th entry in an array of size 10:

int *array = (int *) malloc(10 * sizeof(int));
...
for (int i = 0; i <= 10 /* WHOOPS */; ++i)
    array[i] = calculate(i);

These kinds of errors are relatively common in practice. (Other errors can happen, such as writing to totally random locations in memory, or writing to memory before the beginning of an allocated block, rather than after its end; but after-the-end boundary writes seem most common.)

A debugging memory allocator can't detect boundary read errors, but it can detect many boundary write errors. Your m61_free(ptr, file, line) should print an error message and call abort() if it detects that the memory block associated with ptr suffered a boundary write error.

No debugging malloc could possibly detect all boundary write errors. For example, consider this:

int *array = (int *) malloc(10 * sizeof(int));
int secret = array[10];     // save boundary value
array[10] = 1384139431;     // boundary write error
array[10] = secret;         // restore old value! dmalloc can't tell there was an error!

Or this:

int *array = (int *) malloc(10 * sizeof(int));
array[200000] = 0;          // a boundary write error, but very far from the boundary!

We’re just expecting your code to catch common simple cases. You should definitely catch the case where the user writes one or more zero bytes directly after the allocated block.

Test programs test018.c through test020.c check your work.

Memory leak reporting

A memory leak happens when code allocates a block of memory but forgets to free it. Memory leaks are not as serious as other memory errors, particularly in short-running programs. They don't cause a crash directly. (The operating system always reclaims all of a program's memory when the program exits.) But in long-running programs, such as your browser!, memory leaks have serious effect and are important to avoid.

Write a m61_printleakreport() function that, when called, prints a report about every allocated object in the system. This report should list every object that has been **malloc()**ed but not **free()**d. Print the report to standard output (not standard error). A report should look like this:

LEAK CHECK: test023.c:23: allocated object 0x9b811e0 with size 19
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:21: allocated object 0x9b81170 with size 17
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:20: allocated object 0x9b81140 with size 16
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:19: allocated object 0x9b81110 with size 15
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:18: allocated object 0x9b810e0 with size 14
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:16: allocated object 0x9b81080 with size 12
LEAK CHECK: test023.c:15: allocated object 0x9b81050 with size 11

A programmer would use this leak checker by calling m61_printleakreport() before exiting the program, after cleaning up all the memory they could using free() calls. Any missing **free()**s would show up in the leak report.

To implement a leak checker, you'll need to keep track of every active allocated block of memory. It's easiest to do this by adding more information to the block metadata. You will use the file and line arguments to m61_malloc()/m61_realloc()/m61_calloc().

Note: You may assume that the file argument to these functions has static storage duration. This means you don't need to copy the string’s contents into your block metadata—it is safe to use the string pointer.

Test programs test021.c through test023.c check your work.

Advanced reports and checking

Test programs test024.c, test025.c, and test026.c require you to update your reporting and error detection code. You’ll print better information and defend against more diabolically invalid frees.

Update your invalid free message. After determining that a pointer is invalid, your code should check whether the pointer is inside a different allocated block. This will use the same structures you created for the leak checker. If the invalid pointer is inside another block, print out that block, like so:

MEMORY BUG: test024.c:10: invalid free of pointer 0x833306c, not allocated
 test024.c:9: 0x833306c is 100 bytes inside a 2001 byte region allocated here

And make sure your invalid free detector can handle the diabolical situations in the other tests. What situations? Check the test code to find out!

Style (10%)

Your code should be clean, clear, correct, and consistent. The most important style guideline is consistency. Our handout code follows a certain format (indentation amount, comment usage, variable names). We won't grade you down if you choose a different format. But pick a format. Don't write code that changes style from line to line.

For this problem set, additional coding guidelines will be incorporated into your grade.

Heavy hitter reports (20%)

Memory allocation is one of the more expensive things a program can do. It is possible to make a program run much faster by optimizing how that program uses malloc, and by optimizing malloc itself. (Did you know that both Google and Facebook have malloc specialists? Here’s Google’s tcmalloc, and Facebook liked jemalloc so much that they hired Jason Evans.)

But before optimizing a program, we must measure that program’s performance. It is super useful therefore to have a memory allocation profiler that tracks and reports potential memory allocation problems.

Your job is to design and implement a particular kind of profiling, heavy hitter reports, for your memory allocator. This has two parts. You will:

  1. Track the most expensive (“heavy”) users of malloc() by code location (file and line).
  2. Generate a readable report that summarizes this information.

Rule 1: If a program makes lots of allocations, and a single line of code is responsible for 20% or more of the total bytes allocated by a program, then your heavy-hitter report should mention that line of code (possibly among others).

Rule 2: Your design should handle both large numbers of allocations and large numbers of allocation sites. In particular, you should be able to handle a program that calls malloc() at 10,000 different file-line pairs.

Rule 3: Your report should include some information that helps the user decide which lines are likely to be the heaviest hitters, such as exact or estimated byte counts, or even just by ordering the hitters.

How should you implement this? That’s up to you, but here are some pointers.

We provide a test program for you to test heavy hitter reports, hhtest.c. This program contains 40 different allocators which allocate regions of different sizes. Its first argument, the skew, varies the relative probabilities that each allocator is run.

For example, if you run hhtest 0, then every allocator is called with equal probability. But allocator #39 (which is at httest.c:47) allocates twice as much data as any other. So when we run our dirt-simple heavy hitter detector against hhtest 0 (after adding a call to our heavy-hitter printer to hhtest.c), it reports:

HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:47: 1643786191 bytes (~50.1%)
HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:46: 817311692 bytes (~25.0%)
HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:45: 403156951 bytes (~12.4%)

(Your detector doesn’t need to follow this output format.)

If we run hhtest 1, however, then the first allocator (hhtest.c:7) is called twice as often as the next allocator, which is called twice as often as the next allocator, and so forth. There is almost no chance that allocator #39 is called at all. The report for hhtest 1 is:

HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:8: 499043 bytes (~50.0%)
HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:9: 249136 bytes (~25.0%)
HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:10: 123995 bytes (~12.5%)

At some intermediate skews, though, and there may be no heavy hitters at all. Our code reports nothing when run against hhtest 0.4.

Negative skews call the large allocators more frequently. hhtest -0.4:

HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:47: 15862542908 bytes (~62.1%)
HEAVY HITTER: hhtest.c:46: 6004585020 bytes (~23.5%)

Try ./hhtest --help to get a full description of hhtest’s arguments. You should test with many different arguments; for instance, make sure you try different allocation “phases.”

This idea can be taken quite far. Google, for example, links a heavy-hitter detector with many important servers. It is possible (within Google) to connect to many servers and generate a graph of its current heavy hitter allocation sites, including their calling functions and relationships among functions. Here's a little example (scroll down the page); here's a bigger one. Have fun!!

Extra credit opportunities

  1. Implement a particularly awesome heavy-hitter detector. For example, make your heavy-hitter detector find frequent allocations as well as heavy allocations. Allocating a single byte a billion times is expensive, even if the byte is immediately freed each time! So augment your heavy hitter detector to report call sites that are responsible for 20% or more of the total number of allocations the program made, even if those call sites aren’t responsible for many total bytes relative to other call sites.
  2. Extend your debugging allocator. For instance, include a full heap checker, which should cross-check heap data structures to see if any wild writes have corrupted internal heap state. Check with us if you're not sure whether your extension is worthwhile.

Debugging allocators have a long history. dmalloc is one of the early ones; here’s a list of some others. In fact, Mac OS and Linux’s memory allocators already turn on some debugging features by default! (We turn off those features in our GNUmakefile.)

Feel free to look at the code and documentation for other allocators to get ideas, but make sure you cite them if you do.

Turnin

You will turn in your code using Git. In the pset1/ subdirectory, you MUST include a text file called README.txt. This file should list:

Notes

This lab was originally created for CS 61.