Short description: Don't corrupt heap if top chunk is MINSIZE. Author(s): Mel Gorman Origin: git://sourceware.org/git/glibc.git Bug-RHEL: N/A Bug-Fedora: N/A Bug-Upstream: #18502 Upstream status: committed commit f8ef472c0ff4644445ec716036d31430b4fa4bab Author: Mel Gorman Date: Mon Jun 8 13:36:13 2015 +0100 malloc: Do not corrupt the top of a threaded heap if top chunk is MINSIZE [BZ #18502] mksquashfs was reported in openSUSE to be causing segmentation faults when creating installation images. Testing showed that mksquashfs sometimes failed and could be reproduced within 10 attempts. The core dump looked like the heap top was corrupted and was pointing to an unmapped area. In other cases, this has been due to an application corrupting glibc structures but mksquashfs appears to be fine in this regard. The problem is that heap_trim is "growing" the top into unmapped space. If the top chunk == MINSIZE then top_area is -1 and this check does not behave as expected due to a signed/unsigned comparison if (top_area <= pad) return 0; The next calculation extra = ALIGN_DOWN(top_area - pad, pagesz) calculates extra as a negative number which also is unnoticed due to a signed/unsigned comparison. We then call shrink_heap(heap, negative_number) which crashes later. This patch adds a simple check against MINSIZE to make sure extra does not become negative. It adds a cast to hint to the reader that this is a signed vs unsigned issue. Without the patch, mksquash fails within 10 attempts. With it applied, it completed 1000 times without error. The standard test suite "make check" showed no changes in the summary of test results. Index: glibc-2.17-c758a686/malloc/arena.c =================================================================== --- glibc-2.17-c758a686.orig/malloc/arena.c +++ glibc-2.17-c758a686/malloc/arena.c @@ -705,7 +705,7 @@ heap_trim(heap_info *heap, size_t pad) return 0; top_area = top_size - MINSIZE - 1; - if (top_area <= pad) + if (top_area < 0 || (size_t) top_area <= pad) return 0; /* Release in pagesize units and round down to the nearest page. */