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Summary

Importing a compact region using importCompact from the ghc-compact package fails if the addresses of the compact region blocks span across more than 2 GiB.

Steps to reproduce

The smallest Haskell example for reproducing the bug I could make is the following:

import qualified Data.Compact as Compact
import qualified Data.Compact.Serialize as CompactSerialize

-- | Minimal test case for reproducing compactFixupPointers# bug for large compact regions.
main :: IO ()
main = do
  let
    large = 1024 * 1024 * 128
    largeString = replicate large 'A'

  region <- Compact.compact largeString
  Compact.compactSize region >>= print

  CompactSerialize.writeCompact "/tmp/bug.compact" region
  deserialized <- CompactSerialize.unsafeReadCompact "/tmp/bug.compact"
  case deserialized of
    Left err -> putStrLn err
    Right largeString' -> print (Compact.getCompact largeString' == largeString)

It uses the compact library, but I could also reproduce it with a hand-rolled deserializer calling GHC.Compact.Serialized.importCompact directly.

Compiling and running that file results in Failed to import compact being printed to stdout. I traced that error message (which comes from the compact library) back to a call to compactFixupPointers# in the ghc-compact library.

I had a quick look at the corresponding source code of the RTS (in rts/sm/CNF.c) and I suspect a faulty order predicate passed to qsort in build_fixup_table is the root cause of the issue. It is implemented as

static int
cmp_fixup_table_item (const void *e1, const void *e2)
{
    const StgWord *w1 = e1;
    const StgWord *w2 = e2;

    return *w1 - *w2;
}

However, on a 64 bit system, sizeof(int) is still just 4 bytes while the difference of two StgWords is 8 bytes in size. If the two pointers being compared are too far apart, an overflow causes the returned order to be the reverse of the actual order.

The following self-contained C program demonstrates this behavior (if compiled on a 64 bit architecture):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>

typedef uint64_t StgWord;

static int
cmp_fixup_table_item (const void *e1, const void *e2)
{
    const StgWord *w1 = e1;
    const StgWord *w2 = e2;

    return *w1 - *w2;
}

static void
check (const StgWord *e1, const StgWord *e2)
{
  printf("*e1 = %ld *e2=%ld\n", *e1, *e2);
  printf("*e1 < *e2 == %d\n", (int)(*e1 < *e2));
  printf("cmp_fixup_table_item(e1,e2) == %d\n\n", cmp_fixup_table_item(e1, e2));
}

int main() {
  StgWord examplePointer1 = 1234567;
  StgWord examplePointer2 = examplePointer1 + 1234;

  StgWord bigOffset = (1L << 31) + 1234L;
  StgWord examplePointer3 = examplePointer1 + bigOffset;

  check(&examplePointer1, &examplePointer2);
  check(&examplePointer1, &examplePointer3);

  return 0;
}

The output is

*e1 = 1234567 *e2=1235801
*e1 < *e2 == 1
cmp_fixup_table_item(e1,e2) == -1234

*e1 = 1234567 *e2=2148719449
*e1 < *e2 == 1
cmp_fixup_table_item(e1,e2) == 2147482414

Note how for pointers that are close to each other, it returns a negative number (as it should), but if the pointers are too far apart, the sign switches.

Expected behavior

The Haskell program above should print True, not an error message.

Environment

• GHC version used: 8.6.3

Optional:

• Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04
• System Architecture: x86-64