PATCH: [perl #127708] segfault in "$!" in threads

This was showing up on Darwin because its setlocale is particularly not
thread safe.  But the problem is more generic.  Using locales just
isn't a good idea in a threaded application, as locales are
process-wide, not thread-specific.  Calling setlocale() changes the
locale of all threads at the same time.  Further the return of
setlocale() is a pointer to internal storage.  If you call setlocale()
just to learn what it currently is without actually changing the locale,
there is no guarantee that another thread won't interrupt your thread,
switching the locale to something else before you've had a chance to
copy it somewhere else for safekeeping, and the internal storage may
have been freed during that interruption, leading to things like
segfaults.

This is a problem that has been around in the locale handling code for a
long time.  I don't know why it hasn't shown up before, or maybe it has
and is not reproducible because it's timing dependent, and so any
problems didn't have tickets written for them, or were rejected as not
reproducible.

But the problem has been made worse in recent releases.  Only fairly
recently has perl changed so this problem can occur in programs that
don't use locale explicitly: ones that don't 'use locale' nor call
setlocale().  This ticket is for such a program that gets a
locale-related segfault, without ever touching locales itself.

I have done an audit of the perl source, looking for all such
occurrences, and this patch fixes all of them that I found.  The only
other ones, besides "$!", is in converting to/from UTF-8 in cygwin.c.
In all such cases, perl briefly switches the locale, does an operation,
then switches back.  The solution here is to add mutexes to make these
areas of code uninterruptible critical sections, so that they can rely
on having the locale be what they expect it to be during the entirety of
the operation, and can't have a setlocale() from another thread free
internal storage.  But this is not a general solution.  A thread
executing these sections can interrupt some other thread doing a
setlocale() and zap that.  However, we have long cautioned against doing
setlocales() in a thread, and that caution was strengthened in a commit
made yesterday, fc82b82ef4784a38877f35f56ee16f14934460ce.

The current commit should make safe all threaded programs that don't use
locales explicitly.

It's too close to the 5.24 release to do the rearchitecting required for
a general solution.  That would involve adding more critical sections.

POSIX 2008 introduced new locale handling functions that are
thread-safe, and affect only a single thread, and don't require mutexes.
The ultimate solution would be to use those tools where available, and
to hide from the outer code which set is being used.  Thus, perl would
be thread-safe on such platforms, while remaining problematic on older
ones, though fixed so segfaults wouldn't occur.  Tony Cook believes we
could emulate the newer behavior on all platforms at a significant
performance penalty.  I think this would require a lot of code, and
suspect there would be glitches in it for XS code.  But he may have
some ideas about how to do it simply.  In any case, this has to wait
until post 5.24.

Three other notes:

It seems to me that the cygwin code could be replaced by equivalent code
that doesn't use locales at all.  The comments in the source seem to
even indicate that.  I'll look into doing this in 5.25.

Another possible reason that this hasn't shown up in earlier perls is
that the problems may have been entirely affecting I/O operations and
there are already mutexes involving I/O, and so those could be
inadvertently protecting from, or at least minimizing, the problems
found here.  I haven't investigated to verify this.

This commit doesn't add a test.  I am asking on p5p for assistance in
writing one

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/perl.h b/perl.h
index 49330d1aed..396bc928b5 100644
--- a/perl.h
+++ b/perl.h
@@ -5958,6 +5958,9 @@ typedef struct am_table_short AMTS;
 #   define LOCALE_INIT   MUTEX_INIT(&PL_locale_mutex)
 #   define LOCALE_TERM   MUTEX_DESTROY(&PL_locale_mutex)
 
+#   define LOCALE_LOCK   MUTEX_LOCK(&PL_locale_mutex)
+#   define LOCALE_UNLOCK MUTEX_UNLOCK(&PL_locale_mutex)
+
 /* Returns TRUE if the plain locale pragma without a parameter is in effect
  */
 #   define IN_LOCALE_RUNTIME	cBOOL(CopHINTS_get(PL_curcop) & HINT_LOCALE)
@@ -6043,6 +6046,8 @@ typedef struct am_table_short AMTS;
 #else   /* No locale usage */
 #   define LOCALE_INIT
 #   define LOCALE_TERM
+#   define LOCALE_LOCK
+#   define LOCALE_UNLOCK
 #   define IN_LOCALE_RUNTIME                0
 #   define IN_SOME_LOCALE_FORM_RUNTIME      0
 #   define IN_LOCALE_COMPILETIME            0