[Qemu-devel] ARM hosts: code_gen_alloc() maps code buffer on top of libc heap

[Peter Maydell]

I've been tracking down a bug where qemu run on ARM hosts will
(about half of the time) abort early in execution with:

qemu-system-i386: malloc.c:3096: sYSMALLOc: Assertion `(old_top ==
(((mbinptr) (((char *) &((av)->bins[((1) - 1) * 2])) -
__builtin_offsetof (struct malloc_chunk, fd)))) && old_size == 0) ||
((unsigned long) (old_size) >= (unsigned long)((((__builtin_offsetof
(struct malloc_chunk, fd_nextsize))+((2 * (sizeof(size_t))) - 1)) &
~((2 * (sizeof(size_t))) - 1))) && ((old_top)->size & 0x1) &&
((unsigned long)old_end & pagemask) == 0)' failed.

This turns out to be because code_gen_alloc() is using
mmap(MAP_FIXED) to map the code buffer at address
0x01000000UL, which is in the area glibc happens to be using
for its heap. This tends to make the next malloc() abort,
although occasionally the stars align and we pass that
and fail weirdly later on.

I suspect we need to drop the MAP_FIXED requirement and
fix the TCG code to cope with emitting code for longer-range
branches for calls to host fns etc (calls/branches within the
generated code should be ok to keep using the short-range
branch insn I think). There is already no guarantee that
the generated code and the host C code are within short
branch range of each other...

-- PMM