[binutils-gdb] gcore: Handle unreadable pages within readable memory regions
Kevin Buettner
kevinb@sourceware.org
Tue Feb 17 17:45:10 GMT 2026
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=c1da013915e93155ddeedb2aea50ce3e29689e17
commit c1da013915e93155ddeedb2aea50ce3e29689e17
Author: Kevin Buettner <kevinb@redhat.com>
Date: Thu Jan 29 15:09:24 2026 -0700
gcore: Handle unreadable pages within readable memory regions
GLIBC 2.42 changed how thread stack guard pages are implemented [2].
In GLIBC 2.41 and earlier, guard pages were set up using mprotect() to
mark guard regions with no permissions. Once configured, guard pages
were visible as separate entries in /proc/PID/maps with no permissions
(i.e. they're inaccessible). In GLIBC 2.42, guard pages are
installed using the kernel's MADV_GUARD_INSTALL mechanism [1], which
marks them at the page table entry (PTE) level within the existing
mapping.
As a consequence, guard pages do not appear as separate entries in
/proc/PID/maps, but remain as part of the containing mapping. Moreover,
thread stacks from multiple mmap() calls may be merged into a single
virtual memory area (VMA) with read and write permissions since there's
no guard page VMA to separate them. These guard pages cannot be
distinguished by examining VMA listings but do return EIO when read
from /proc/PID/mem.
GDB's gcore code reads /proc/PID/smaps to discover memory regions and
creates one BFD section per mapping. (On linux, this is performed in
linux_find_memory_regions_full in linux-tdep.c.) With the old layout,
memory areas with guard pages appeared separately with no permissions,
which were filtered out. Each thread stack became its own section
containing only readable data. With the new layout, using
MADV_GUARD_INSTALL instead of the older mechanism, it's often the case
that thread stacks created with multiple calls to mmap() are exposed
as a single mapping appearing in /proc/PID/smaps with read and write
permissions. Should that happen, GDB's code creates a single section
covering all thread stacks and their guard pages. (Even if each
thread stack appears in its own mapping, the fact remains that there
will be an inaccessible portion of the mapping. When one or more
thread stacks are coalesced into a single mapping, there will be
several inaccessible "holes" representing the guard pages.)
When gcore_copy_callback copies section contents, it reads memory in
1MB (MAX_COPY_BYTES) chunks. If any page in the chunk is a guard page,
the call to target_read_memory() fails. The old code responded by
breaking out of the copy loop, abandoning the entire section. This
prevents correct copying of thread stack data, resulting in core files
with zero-filled thread stacks, resulting in nearly empty backtraces.
Fix this by falling back to page-by-page reading when a 1MB chunk read
fails. Individual pages that cannot be read are filled with zeros,
allowing the remaining readable memory to be captured.
I also considered a simpler change using the value of
FALLBACK_PAGE_SIZE (4096) as the read size instead of MAX_COPY_BYTES
(1MB). This would avoid the fallback logic but would cause up to 256x
more syscalls. The proposed approach also allows meaningful warnings:
we warn only if an entire region is unreadable (indicating a real
problem), whereas per-page reads would make it harder to distinguish
guard page failures from actual errors. Since guard pages are at
offset 0 for downward-growing stacks, a large target_read_memory()
fails early at the first unreadable byte anyway.
With this fix, I see 16 failures resolved in the following test cases:
gdb.ada/task_switch_in_core.exp
gdb.arch/i386-tls-regs.exp
gdb.threads/threadcrash.exp
gdb.threads/tls-core.exp
Looking at just one of these, from gdb.log without the fix, I see:
thread apply 5 backtrace
Thread 5 (LWP 3414829):
#0 0x00007ffff7d1d982 in __syscall_cancel_arch () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1 0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
(gdb) FAIL: gdb.threads/threadcrash.exp: test_gcore: thread apply 5 backtrace
And this is what it looks like with the fix in place (some paths have
been shortened):
thread apply 5 backtrace
Thread 5 (Thread 0x7fffeffff6c0 (LWP 1282651) "threadcrash"):
#0 0x00007ffff7d1d982 in __syscall_cancel_arch () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1 0x00007ffff7d11c3c in __internal_syscall_cancel () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#2 0x00007ffff7d61b62 in clock_nanosleep@GLIBC_2.2.5 () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#3 0x00007ffff7d6db37 in nanosleep () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#4 0x00007ffff7d8008e in sleep () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#5 0x00000000004006a8 in do_syscall_task (location=NORMAL) at threadcrash.c:158
#6 0x0000000000400885 in thread_function (arg=0x404340) at threadcrash.c:277
#7 0x00007ffff7d15464 in start_thread () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#8 0x00007ffff7d985ac in __clone3 () from /lib64/libc.so.6
(gdb) PASS: gdb.threads/threadcrash.exp: test_live_inferior: thread apply 5 backtrace
Regression testing on Fedora 42 (glibc 2.41) shows no new failures.
The v1 patch used SPARSE_BLOCK_SIZE as the fallback size. While it
was the correct size, it's used for an entirely different purpose
elsewhere in this file. This v2 commit introduces the constant
FALLBACK_PAGE_SIZE instead.
References:
[1] Linux commit 662df3e5c376 ("mm: madvise: implement lightweight
guard page mechanism")
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=662df3e5c37666d6ed75c88098699e070a4b35b5
[2] glibc commit a6fbe36b7f31 ("nptl: Add support for setup guard
pages with MADV_GUARD_INSTALL")
https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=a6fbe36b7f31292981422692236465ab56670ea9
Claude Opus 4.5 and GLM 4.7 assisted with the development of this commit.
Bug: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33855
Approved-By: Tom de Vries <tdevries@suse.de>
Diff:
---
gdb/gcore.c | 52 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
1 file changed, 44 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
diff --git a/gdb/gcore.c b/gdb/gcore.c
index 5a3ad145d4c..7bf2f00e866 100644
--- a/gdb/gcore.c
+++ b/gdb/gcore.c
@@ -743,6 +743,12 @@ sparse_bfd_set_section_contents (bfd *obfd, asection *osec,
return true;
}
+/* Fallback page size to use when target_read_memory fails when attempting
+ to read MAX_COPY_BYTES in gcore_copy_callback. 4KB is the correct size
+ to use for x86 and most other architectures. Some may have larger pages,
+ but this size will still work at the cost of more syscalls. */
+#define FALLBACK_PAGE_SIZE 0x1000
+
static void
gcore_copy_callback (bfd *obfd, asection *osec)
{
@@ -765,15 +771,45 @@ gcore_copy_callback (bfd *obfd, asection *osec)
if (size > total_size)
size = total_size;
- if (target_read_memory (bfd_section_vma (osec) + offset,
- memhunk.data (), size) != 0)
+ CORE_ADDR vma = bfd_section_vma (osec) + offset;
+
+ if (target_read_memory (vma, memhunk.data (), size) != 0)
{
- warning (_("Memory read failed for corefile "
- "section, %s bytes at %s."),
- plongest (size),
- paddress (current_inferior ()->arch (),
- bfd_section_vma (osec)));
- break;
+ /* Large read failed. This can happen when the memory region
+ contains unreadable pages (such as guard pages embedded within
+ a larger mapping). Fall back to reading page by page, filling
+ unreadable pages with zeros. */
+ gdb_byte *p = memhunk.data ();
+ bfd_size_type remaining = size;
+ CORE_ADDR addr = vma;
+ bool at_least_one_page_read = false;
+
+ while (remaining > 0)
+ {
+ bfd_size_type chunk_size
+ = std::min (remaining, (bfd_size_type) FALLBACK_PAGE_SIZE);
+
+ if (target_read_memory (addr, p, chunk_size) != 0)
+ {
+ /* Failed to read this page. Fill with zeros. This
+ handles guard pages and other unreadable regions
+ that may exist within a larger readable mapping. */
+ memset (p, 0, chunk_size);
+ }
+ else
+ at_least_one_page_read = true;
+
+ p += chunk_size;
+ addr += chunk_size;
+ remaining -= chunk_size;
+ }
+ /* Warn only if the entire region was unreadable - this
+ indicates a real problem, not just embedded guard pages. */
+ if (!at_least_one_page_read)
+ warning (_("Memory read failed for corefile "
+ "section, %s bytes at %s."),
+ plongest (size),
+ paddress (current_inferior ()->arch (), vma));
}
if (!sparse_bfd_set_section_contents (obfd, osec, memhunk.data (),
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