Implementation of GHC.Event.Poll.poll is broken due to bad coercion
Due to an unsafe coercion in GHC.Event.Poll.poll the implementation has a bug that on some platforms (.e.g. linux) results in subtly wrong semantics and on other platforms (e.g. OS X) downright crashes the runtime.
The offending line is line 95 in GHC/Event/Poll.hsc:
c_poll ptr (fromIntegral len) (fromIntegral (fromTimeout tout))fromTimeout returns a timeout in seconds as a value of type Int. c_poll takes a timeout in seconds as a value of type CInt. If the max value of Int is larger than that of CInt, this coercion results in an overflow, producing a negative value. The faulty semantics are in turn caused by passing this negative value as timeout to c_poll.
This overflow happens on many 64bit platforms where GHC's Int is 64bit, but CInt is often 32bit. The result of passing a negative value to poll() depends on the platform, but is (on all platforms I checked) different from the desired semantics!
On linux any negative timeouts are treated as infinite, this means that a poll() with a timeout that should be finite results in an infinitely blocking poll on linux!
On OSX any negative timeout other than -1 (which is treated as infinity) is considered an invalid parameter, returning an error and crashing the runtime.
A minimal example reproducing the error (on systems where fromIntegral (maxBound :: Int) > (fromIntegral (maxBound :: CInt) :: Integer)):
import Control.Concurrent
main = threadDelay maxBoundUsing 64bit GHC on OSX this produces an immediate runtime crash.
The attached patch solves the issue by comparing the Int timeout against the max value of CInt and, if necessary, looping multiple c_poll calls (with a timeout equal to maxBound :: CInt) if they return 0 (which indicates the timeout has expired with no events occurring).
See also: https://github.com/merijn/packages-base/commit/6d8ea02a3f6a2cdb82a9ad786a8c4db780b92091
Trac metadata
| Trac field | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 7.6.3 |
| Type | Bug |
| TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
| Priority | normal |
| Resolution | Unresolved |
| Component | libraries/base |
| Test case | |
| Differential revisions | |
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| Related | |
| Blocking | |
| CC | |
| Operating system | |
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