I would be happy to see this discussion continue on the MPICH devel list even if it gets into LLVM weeds.  Tools for ensuring count-safety are vital to MPICH and related efforts in the MPI community, and I think many of the people who are subscribed to devel@mpich.org would be interested in this topic.  At the very least, they should tolerate it, since everyone on that list knows how to use email filters ;-)

Best,

Jeff

On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Ignacio Laguna <lagunaperalt1@llnl.gov> wrote:
Rob,

Thanks for replying! I'm answering your questions inline below.

On 10/1/15 9:15 AM, Rob Latham wrote:


On 09/30/2015 04:08 PM, Ignacio Laguna wrote:
Hi,

I found some 'potential' integer overflows when running mpich at large
scale and/or with large inputs in gather.c. I believe that they are
related to ticket #1767
(http://trac.mpich.org/projects/mpich/ticket/1767), but I didn't see any
other bug reports about them so I thought I should confirm with mpich
developers.

In addition to this case in line 171:

     98        int tmp_buf_size, missing;
...
    169        if (nbytes < MPIR_CVAR_GATHER_VSMALL_MSG_SIZE)
tmp_buf_size++;
    170
    171        tmp_buf_size *= nbytes;

which I believe it's fixed in mpich-3.2b4 (where tmp_buf_size is
declared as a 64-bit MPI_Aint),

I fixed this (I sure hope!) over the summer in commit 68f8c7aa798f7009


Yes, this is fixed (according to my analysis), so don't worry, I just used it as a reference.


I found the following cases in the same
file src/mpi/coll/gather.c (in both mpich-3.1.4 and mpich-3.2b4):

Case 1:

    222    mpi_errno = MPIC_Recv(((char *)recvbuf +
    223                (((rank + mask) % comm_size)*recvcount*extent)),
    224                recvblks * recvcount, recvtype, src,
    225                MPIR_GATHER_TAG, comm,
    226                &status, errflag);

In line 223 I believe we get an integer overflow as follows. Suppose I
run 2^20 = 1,048,576 ranks and do a gather with 4,096 elements. In this
case (if I understand the algorithm well), ((rank + mask) % comm_size)
would be 2^20 / 2 = 524,288, and recvcount = 4,096. Then the ((rank +
mask) % comm_size)*recvcount expression would overflow: 524,288 * 4,096
= 2,147,483,648, and become negative.

We're doing address math here, so I hope the compiler is not trying to
store intermediate results in an integer.  However, if LLVM is saying
otherwise, then sure, let's promote those types.

  ((rank + mask) % comm_size)*recvcount is of type int*int, which is
then multiplied by an MPI_Aint... yeah, looks suspicious.

Even when they are intermediate operations, the compiler could place the result of ((rank + mask) % comm_size)*recvcount in an 32-bit integer register. In fact, in llvm with -O0 optimization level that's what it does. This is the portion of the code in llvm IR:

  %mul220 = mul nsw i32 %rem219.pre, %recvcount
  %conv221 = sext i32 %mul220 to i64
  %mul222 = mul nsw i64 %conv221, %extent.1851
  %add.ptr223 = getelementptr inbounds i8* %recvbuf, i64 %mul222

In the first line it multiplies the result of ((rank + mask) % comm_size) with recvcount. Note that this is a 32-bit multiplication (it says i32). Then in the 2nd line it extends the result to a 64-bit register (unfortunately at this point %mul220 is already wrapped around) and stores it in %conv221. Then it multiplies it by %extent, and then gets an element of the array (with getelementptr).

I'm not sure if this would be a problem with higher optimization levels, though, but we should not rely on that.

I also verified these things are propagated to actual machine registers by looking at the assembly code. Here's an example:

$ cat test.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
  int val1, val2;
  long long tmp, final;
  val1 = (1 << 20) / 2;
  val2 = 4096;
  tmp = 4;
  final = val1 * val2 * tmp;
  printf("val1: %d, val2: %d, final: %lld\n", val1, val2, final);
  return 0;
}

I compiled it with clang and -O0 and this is what I get when I run it:

$ ./test
val1: 524288, val2: 4096, final: -8589934592

This is the assembly code in my Mac:

$ otool -vVt test
test:
(__TEXT,__text) section
_main:
0000000100000f00        pushq   %rbp
0000000100000f01        movq    %rsp, %rbp
0000000100000f04        subq    $0x30, %rsp
0000000100000f08        leaq    0x6f(%rip), %rdi
0000000100000f0f        movl    $0x0, -0x4(%rbp)
0000000100000f16        movl    $0x80000, -0x8(%rbp)
0000000100000f1d        movl    $0x1000, -0xc(%rbp)
0000000100000f24        movq    $0x4, -0x18(%rbp)
0000000100000f2c        movl    -0x8(%rbp), %eax
0000000100000f2f        imull   -0xc(%rbp), %eax
0000000100000f33        movslq  %eax, %rcx
0000000100000f36        imulq   -0x18(%rbp), %rcx

The first multiplication with imull is stored in %eax, and then second one in %rcx, but at this point %eax already has an overflow.


There are quite a few places where we do math on recvcount and
recvblocks -- does your static analysis show problems with all of those
spots?


I checked all MPI calls in mpich-3.2b4 and the analysis doesn't report anything else. Now, this doesn't mean there are no more bugs--just that it could not find anything else :-)

When multiplied with 'extent', which is size_t or MPI_Aint, it will
become negative I believe or a huge positive which in any case will
point to the wrong location in the recvbuf buffer, unless of course this
wraparound behavior is intended.

Nope, wraparound sure is not intended!  We would have no hope of
cleaning up all these locations if it were not for clang's
-Wshorten64-to-32 flag.


Thanks! I was just double checking. In some programs wraparounds are actually intended.

Case 2:

There might be a similar problem in line 224 in the above code. With
2^20 ranks, recvblks becomes 524,288 (again if I understand well the
algorithm), so the recvblks * recvcount operation will also overflow.

I might be wrong on this -- I'm catching these issues with LLVM symbolic
analysis -- so they can be totally false positives,

Tell me more about LLVM symbolic analysis!  We have started using
coverity for static analysis but yes, there are a lot of messages
obscuring the genuine bugs.

I can tell you more in a separate email (I know this mailing list is only for mpich discussions).

Basically we are looking for scale-dependent bugs, i.e., bugs that will only manifest at large scale and/or with large inputs. It does data-flow analysis to understand what code is dependent on things like the size of the problem (in mpich and/or MPI apps this is basically code that depends on the size of the communicators, for example). It then performs tests to see if things could go wrong at large scale, e.g., by replacing ranks = 1 million values and so on. And then it reports what line of the code and file the problem is.

Having said that, coverity should find much more bugs. This is very specialized for scale-dependent bugs.


but I just wanted to
check with the mpich developers if they are valid issues or not. If they
are, I believe fixes can be easy to implement (just make all these
computations size_t).

I promoted the prototype for MPIC_Recv to this:

int MPIC_Recv(void *buf, MPI_Aint count,
MPI_Datatype datatype, int source, int tag,
MPID_Comm *comm_ptr, MPI_Status *status,
MPIR_Errflag_t *errflag)

Top-level MPI routines are stuck using an 'int' count, but internally we
can (and now do) use a larger MPI_Aint type.

True, int*int can overflow, but since that parameter to MPIC_Recv is of
the larger MPI_Aint type, we're ok here.   LLVM disagrees?


Once you have a version I can download with the patches, I can run the analysis again and see if I can catch more things. Just let me know and I would be happy to test it.

In general, overflows can also occur in intermediate computations, depending on how code is optimized, I believe.

Thanks!

Ignacio

==rob

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--
Jeff Hammond
jeff.science@gmail.com
http://jeffhammond.github.io/