Fork failures

[Ryan Johnson <ryan dot johnson at cs dot utoronto dot ca>]

Hi all,

This message is in reference to the ongoing discussion about fork 
failures, a which I'd like to work on and hopefully fix.

There seem to be (at least) three separate problems related to fork():

1. Two or more dlls can have the same base address, leading to failures 
to lay out a posix-compliant address space in the child. This one I'm 
particularly interested in fixing, and it looks like (at least for a lot 
of cases) changing reserve_upto() and/or being more careful about dll 
load order could go a long way.

2. BLODA can do Bad Things to cygwin apps. I get the feeling that this 
is becoming a catch-all in some ways -- that most bloda really just 
trigger some underlying bug related to (1) rather than being truly Evil. 
This is a real problem now that even official Windows components 
(windows defender) are making their way onto the list. One thing I'm not 
clear about at all is whether BLODA often do anything worse than trigger 
(1) above. The FAQ isn't very clear about what "less-than transparant" 
means. It's also not clear to me (windows development newbie) whether 
injected dlls could ever be unloaded (and possibly later reloaded) when 
they cause problems.

3. win7-x64 machines seem to trigger access violations at regular 
intervals. I'm not completely sure whether this is a new side effect of 
(1), or an independent problem. I suspect the former, since my own 
experiments suggest that the access violations occur when a forked child 
attempts dll (re)initialization. I'm still diagnosing this one...

My main challenges at this point are
- not knowing an awful lot about how dll loading works (in particular, 
automatic loading of dependent libraries and how cygwin and dll 
entry/exit points work)
- having no idea how ASLR impacts things. It seems like it should make 
the problem go away completely (bloda and all), mooting this whole 
discussion, yet here we are
- Reproducing (1) above reliably enough to debug it
- Knowing whether (1) is the only major source of fork failures

Any pointers to either one would be very helpful -- useful online 
resources are great (I do know how to read, but my google-foo is not 
always strong enough).

Thanks!
Ryan