GHC: segmentation fault under strange conditions

Question

Toady I updated my developing machine from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (or ghc 6.12.1 to ghc 7.4.1) and I run into a very strange behavior at my currenct project.

After some hours, I reduced it to the following code:

{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-}
module Main where

import Data.Word
import Text.Printf
import Foreign

foreign import ccall "dynamic"
   code_void :: FunPtr (IO ()) -> (IO ())

main :: IO ()
main = do
  entryPtr <- (mallocBytes 2)
  poke entryPtr (0xc390 :: Word16) -- nop (0x90); ret(0xc3) (little endian order)

  _ <- printf "entry point: 0x%08x\n" ((fromIntegral $ ptrToIntPtr entryPtr) :: Int)
  _ <- getLine -- for debugging
  code_void $ castPtrToFunPtr entryPtr
  putStrLn "welcome back"

I'm trying to generate some code at run-time, jump to it, and come back again. Using a Makefile, everything is fine:

$ make 
ghc --make -Wall -O2 Main.hs -o stackoverflow_segv
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( Main.hs, Main.o )
Linking stackoverflow_segv ...
./stackoverflow_segv
entry point: 0x098d77e0

welcome back

However, if I call the binary directly from the shell:

$ ./stackoverflow_segv 
entry point: 0x092547e0

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

This behavior is reproducible (luckily?).

Using gdb, objdump and /proc I figured out:

$ gdb -q stackoverflow_segv
Reading symbols from /home/lewurm/stackoverflow/stackoverflow_segv...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/lewurm/stackoverflow/stackoverflow_segv
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
entry point: 0x080fc810

before pressing enter, I switch to a second terminal:

$ cat /proc/`pgrep stackoverflow`/maps
[...]
08048000-080ea000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 2492678    /home/lewurm/stackoverflow/stackoverflow_segv
080ea000-080eb000 r--p 000a2000 08:01 2492678    /home/lewurm/stackoverflow/stackoverflow_segv
080eb000-080f1000 rw-p 000a3000 08:01 2492678    /home/lewurm/stackoverflow/stackoverflow_segv
080f1000-08115000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0          [heap]
[...]

and back again:

<enter>
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x0804ce3c in s2aV_info ()

Boo. Let's see what this code does:

$ objdump -D stackoverflow_segv | grep -C 3 804ce3c
 804ce31:       89 44 24 4c             mov    %eax,0x4c(%esp)
 804ce35:       83 ec 0c                sub    $0xc,%esp
 804ce38:       8b 44 24 4c             mov    0x4c(%esp),%eax
 804ce3c:       ff d0                   call   *%eax
 804ce3e:       83 c4 0c                add    $0xc,%esp
 804ce41:       83 ec 08                sub    $0x8,%esp
 804ce44:       8b 44 24 54             mov    0x54(%esp),%eax

uhm, jumping to *%eax. What was %eax again?

 (gdb) info reg eax
 eax            0x80fc810        135251984

Well, actually it's just the code buffer. Looking up /proc/*/maps tells us, that this page isn't executeable (rw-p, right?). But, it's the same situation when executing it within make.

What is wrong here?

btw, the code is also available via gist

edit: ghc bug report

Answer 1

A temporary solution is to use mprotect(3) and set the memory region explicitly as executable. mprotect(3) requires a aligned memory block, therefore memalign(3) is required.

{-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-}
module Main where

import Data.Word
import Text.Printf
import Foreign
import Foreign.C.Types

foreign import ccall "dynamic"
   code_void :: FunPtr (IO ()) -> (IO ())

foreign import ccall "static sys/mman.h"
  mprotect :: CUInt -> CUInt -> Int -> IO ()

foreign import ccall "static stdlib.h"
  memalign :: CUInt -> CUInt -> IO (Ptr a)


main :: IO ()
main = do
  entryPtr <- memalign 0x1000 0x2
  poke entryPtr (0xc390 :: Word16) -- nop (0x90); ret(0xc3) (little endian order)
  let i_entry = (fromIntegral $ ptrToIntPtr entryPtr) :: Int
  -- 0x7 = PROT_{READ,WRITE,EXEC}
  mprotect (fromIntegral i_entry) 2 0x7

  _ <- printf "entry point: 0x%08x\n" i_entry
  _ <- getLine -- for debugging
  code_void $ castPtrToFunPtr entryPtr
  putStrLn "welcome back"