Fix: relayd: live: mishandled initial null trace chunk
Observed issue
==============
As reported in #1323 (https://bugs.lttng.org/issues/1323), crashes of
the relay daemon are observed when running the user space clear tests.
The crash occurs with the following stack trace:
#0 0x000055fbb861d6ae in urcu_ref_get_unless_zero (ref=0x28) at /usr/local/include/urcu/ref.h:85
#1 lttng_trace_chunk_get (chunk=0x0) at trace-chunk.c:1836
#2 0x000055fbb86051e2 in make_viewer_streams (relay_session=relay_session@entry=0x7f6ea002d540, viewer_session=<optimized out>, seek_t=seek_t@entry=LTTNG_VIEWER_SEEK_BEGINNING, nb_total=nb_total@entry=0x7f6ea9607b00, nb_unsent=nb_unsent@entry=0x7f6ea9607aec, nb_created=nb_created@entry=0x7f6ea9607ae8, closed=<optimized out>) at live.c:405
#3 0x000055fbb86061d9 in viewer_get_new_streams (conn=0x7f6e94000fc0) at live.c:1155
#4 process_control (conn=0x7f6e94000fc0, recv_hdr=0x7f6ea9607af0) at live.c:2353
#5 thread_worker (data=<optimized out>) at live.c:2515
#6 0x00007f6eae86a609 in start_thread () from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0
#7 0x00007f6eae78f293 in clone () from /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
The race window during which this occurs seems very small as it can take
hours to reproduce this crash. However, a minimal reproducer could be
identified, as stated in the bug report.
Essentially, the same crash can be reproduced by attaching a live viewer
to a session that has seen events being produced, been stopped and been
cleared.
Cause
=====
The crash occurs as an attempt is made to take a reference to a viewer
session’s trace chunk as viewer streams are created. The crux of the
problem is that the code doesn’t expect a viewer session’s trace chunk
to be NULL.
The viewer session’s current trace chunk is initially set, when a viewer
attaches to the viewer session, to a copy the corresponding
relay_session’s current trace chunk.
A live session always attempts to "catch-up" to the newest available
trace chunk. This means that when a viewer reaches the end of a trace
chunk, the viewer session may not transition to the "next" one: it jumps
to the most recent trace chunk available (the one being produced by the
relay_session). Hence, if the producer performs multiple rotations
before a viewer completes the consumption of a trace chunk, it will skip
over those "intermediary" trace chunks.
A viewer session updates its current trace chunk when:
1) new viewer streams are created,
2) a new index is requested,
3) metadata is requested.
Hence, as a general principle, the viewer session will reference the
most recent trace chunk available _even if its streams do not point to
it_. It indicates which trace chunk viewer streams should transition to
when the end of their current trace chunk is reached.
The live code properly handles transitions to a null chunk. This can be
verified by attaching a viewer to a live session, stopping the session,
clearing it (thus entering a null trace chunk), and resuming tracing.
The only issue is that the case where the first trace chunk of a viewer
session is "null" (no active trace chunk) is mishandled in two places:
1) in make_viewer_streams(), where the crash is observed,
2) in viewer_get_metadata().
Solution
========
In make_viewer_streams(), it is assumed that a viewer session will have
a non-null trace chunk whenever a rotation is not ongoing. This is
reflected by the fact that a reference is always acquired on the viewer
session’s trace chunk.
That code is one of the three places that can cause a viewer session’s
trace chunk to be updated. We still want to update the viewer session to
the most recently seen trace chunk (null, in this case). However, there
is no reference to acquire and the trace chunk to use for the creation
of the viewer stream is NULL. This is properly handled by
viewer_stream_create().
The second site to change is viewer_get_metadata() which doesn’t handle
a viewer metadata stream not having an active trace chunk at all.
Thankfully, the protocol allows us to express this condition by
returning the LTTNG_VIEWER_NO_NEW_METADATA status code when a viewer
metadata stream doesn’t have an open file and doesn’t have a current
trace chunk.
Surprisingly, this bug didn’t trigger in the case where a transition to
a null chunk occurred _after_ attaching to a viewer session.
This is because viewers will typically ask for metadata as a result of an
LTTNG_VIEWER_FLAG_NEW_METADATA reply to the GET_NEXT_INDEX command. When
a session is stopped and all data was consumed, this command returns
that no new data is available, causing the viewers to wait and ask again
later.
However, when attaching, babeltrace2 (at least, and probably babeltrace 1.x)
always asks for an initial segment of metadata before asking for an
index.
Known drawbacks
===============
None.
Fixes: #1323
Signed-off-by: Jérémie Galarneau <jeremie.galarneau@efficios.com>
Change-Id: I516fca60755e6897f6b7170c12d706ef57ad61a5
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