Re: Handling s390 libc ABI change in Debian

2014-07-15 Thread Philipp Kern
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 07:18:39AM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> I can follow up with a list affected packages, but we are slowly
> discovering them one by one, so it might takes time. So far we have:
> 
> * Mixing modules/libraries built with pre-2.19 and 2.19 libc
> - perl
> - libpng 
> 
> * Using libc 2.19 without rebuilding anything:
> - gauche
> - mono

I think it's pretty important for perl to keep working as much as is
required for the system to upgrade itself. I'd be a bit less concerned
(aside already broken binary compatibility) if the base system keeps
working during the upgrade.

We could conceivably document the breakage in the release upgrade notes,
as long as updates can complete and suggest a reboot afterwards.

> It's a huge work for Debian, maybe not for other distribution, as it
> basically means we have to rebootstrap everything. This includes manual
> bootstrapping of self-dependent languages (haskell, gnat, ...) and
> manual handling of some dependencies loop. In addition it's something
> which hasn't been done since the libc5 transition, so we might discover
> some unexpected issues.

Will it necessarily explode if both libcs are loaded into the same
address space or only if the broken functionality is used? Would
setjmp/longjmp only break if used across libc6/6.1 boundaries? Passing
around an incompatible pthread struct seems bad, though.
If this would work, a re-bootstrap would not necessarily be needed, I
think?

Kind regards and thanks
Philipp Kern 


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Re: Handling s390 libc ABI change in Debian

2014-07-15 Thread Carlos O'Donell
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Aurelien Jarno  wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:14:42PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Aurelien Jarno  wrote:
>> > glibc 2.19 has changed the libc ABI on s390, more specifically the
>> > setjmp/longjmp functions [1] [2]. Symbol versioning is used to handle
>> > some cases, but it doesn't work when a jmp_buf variable is embedded
>> > into a structure, as it changes the size of the structure. The result
>> > is that mixing programs or libraries built with 2.18 with ones built
>> > with 2.19 do not work anymore, usually they end up with a segmentation
>> > fault. Some persons from this list have experienced that with perl.
>>
>> That is not true. This is an over generalization of the problem. You
>> can use libraries built with 2.18 and 2.19 and they work just fine.
>
> I agree I probably a bit over exaggerated here, but the problem is real,
> breakages do happen, and some persons on this mailing list have already
> experienced them.
>
>> The extent of the problem in correct language is listed here:
>> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Release/2.19#Packaging_Changes
>
> This seems to minimize the problem, listing only perl. In practice we
> have seen much more breakages, part of them being due to the change of
> the __pthread_unwind_buf_t struct.

That is a change that nobody reported. You're the first to mention it
and that does make it more serious. We have discussed this upstream
and I agree that we need more versioning of the interfaces there to
support the change fully.

>> > We first thought it was limited to a few packages (even if all perl is
>> > already more than that), but as time goes more and more issues are
>> > found. libpng and gauche are also affected, the issue with mono is
>> > also likely due to this ABI change.
>>
>> That is new information, and it is important for distributions to
>> relay this information back upstream where the decision for a SO bump
>> can be made.
>
> I can follow up with a list affected packages, but we are slowly
> discovering them one by one, so it might takes time. So far we have:
>
> * Mixing modules/libraries built with pre-2.19 and 2.19 libc
> - perl
> - libpng

You can never support a mixed-ABI environment with versioning.

You must update all of those packages at once.

The best we could do is warn the user of the incompatibility at
runtime and refuse to load the module via dlopen, or refuse to start
the application at startup.

> * Using libc 2.19 without rebuilding anything:
> - gauche
> - mono

This we believe to be pthread issues.

>> > According to upstream [3], the problem is that Debian doesn't do a mass
>> > rebuild, which is the strategy chosen by Red Hat to handle^Wworkaround
>> > this issue. This means some programs might segfault during the upgrade,
>> > or on partially upgraded systems.
>>
>> I apologize if you took what I wrote to mean that. I did not mean it
>> was Debian's problem, but rather that Debian suffered the most because
>> they don't do rebuilds. The two are orthogonal. You face a situation
>> that is unique to the framework used to build the distribution.
>>
>> Please engage upstream to champion a SO name bump for libc for
>
> I think that would be the correct solution. That said as it is not
> something trivial and thus not done often, it's an opportunity to push
> for more ABI changes if some others are envisaged in the future.

The problems are worse.

I just tried to simulate this on x86-64 and there are serious problems.

In most libraries you can load multiple different copies and it won't conflict.

Here libc.so.6 and libc.so.7 or libc.so.6.1 all conflict in the same
namespace and worse control aspects of the implementation like TLS. It
doesn't work to bump the SONAME.

We would have to implement a coordination framework amongst all the
SONAME bumped libc's for all of the basic functionality that had to
keep working. That would force future libcs to stay compatible
internally with other libcs and that would be very difficult to
maintain.

I am starting to think that a tooling option to fail to load mixed-ABI
objects is the only option, with user rebuilds happening after that.

>> > Now we have to chose a strategy for Debian. I see multiple options:
>> >
>> > 1) Ignore the issue and just rebuild (binNMU) the packages that seems
>> > affected when we discover them. This means partial upgrades will likely
>> > be broken, and that we might discover some broken packages only after
>> > the jessie release.
>> >
>> > 2) Rebuild (binNMU) all packages. This means partial upgrades will
>> > likely be broken.
>> >
>> > 3) Bump the soname of affected packages and rebuild their reverse
>> > dependencies. It is the solution that is currently being implemented for
>> > perl. It clearly won't scale if more broken packages (and even for
>> > libpng) are discovered as it requires a source upload and a transition
>> > handled by the release team. It also means breaking the

Re: Handling s390 libc ABI change in Debian

2014-07-15 Thread Aurelien Jarno
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 09:21:30AM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 07:18:39AM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> > I can follow up with a list affected packages, but we are slowly
> > discovering them one by one, so it might takes time. So far we have:
> > 
> > * Mixing modules/libraries built with pre-2.19 and 2.19 libc
> > - perl
> > - libpng 
> > 
> > * Using libc 2.19 without rebuilding anything:
> > - gauche
> > - mono
> 
> I think it's pretty important for perl to keep working as much as is
> required for the system to upgrade itself. I'd be a bit less concerned
> (aside already broken binary compatibility) if the base system keeps
> working during the upgrade.

It might not be easy to ensure the upgrade process works correctly. For
example in mono case, as soon as a new libc is installed, mono stops
working, and installing/upgrading a mono package would fail as mono is
called in the postinst (this is bug#751171). We have to avoid this by
using strict dependencies to make sure the packages are installed in the
right order, but we can't guarantee to detect and handle all cases. That
means some upgrades might break.

-- 
Aurelien Jarno  GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net


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Re: Handling s390 libc ABI change in Debian

2014-07-15 Thread Aurelien Jarno
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 03:49:04AM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Aurelien Jarno  wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:14:42PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Aurelien Jarno  wrote:
> >> > glibc 2.19 has changed the libc ABI on s390, more specifically the
> >> > setjmp/longjmp functions [1] [2]. Symbol versioning is used to handle
> >> > some cases, but it doesn't work when a jmp_buf variable is embedded
> >> > into a structure, as it changes the size of the structure. The result
> >> > is that mixing programs or libraries built with 2.18 with ones built
> >> > with 2.19 do not work anymore, usually they end up with a segmentation
> >> > fault. Some persons from this list have experienced that with perl.
> >>
> >> That is not true. This is an over generalization of the problem. You
> >> can use libraries built with 2.18 and 2.19 and they work just fine.
> >
> > I agree I probably a bit over exaggerated here, but the problem is real,
> > breakages do happen, and some persons on this mailing list have already
> > experienced them.
> >
> >> The extent of the problem in correct language is listed here:
> >> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Release/2.19#Packaging_Changes
> >
> > This seems to minimize the problem, listing only perl. In practice we
> > have seen much more breakages, part of them being due to the change of
> > the __pthread_unwind_buf_t struct.
> 
> That is a change that nobody reported. You're the first to mention it
> and that does make it more serious. We have discussed this upstream
> and I agree that we need more versioning of the interfaces there to
> support the change fully.
> 
> >> > We first thought it was limited to a few packages (even if all perl is
> >> > already more than that), but as time goes more and more issues are
> >> > found. libpng and gauche are also affected, the issue with mono is
> >> > also likely due to this ABI change.
> >>
> >> That is new information, and it is important for distributions to
> >> relay this information back upstream where the decision for a SO bump
> >> can be made.
> >
> > I can follow up with a list affected packages, but we are slowly
> > discovering them one by one, so it might takes time. So far we have:
> >
> > * Mixing modules/libraries built with pre-2.19 and 2.19 libc
> > - perl
> > - libpng
> 
> You can never support a mixed-ABI environment with versioning.
> 
> You must update all of those packages at once.
> 
> The best we could do is warn the user of the incompatibility at
> runtime and refuse to load the module via dlopen, or refuse to start
> the application at startup.

For perl we handled that using dependencies in the package manager, and
we can probably add some more checks for user modules. That said that do
not scale if we discover more and more affected packages. This is my
fear so far.

> > * Using libc 2.19 without rebuilding anything:
> > - gauche
> > - mono
> 
> This we believe to be pthread issues.

Yes, this is the pthread issue.

> > It's a huge work for Debian, maybe not for other distribution, as it
> > basically means we have to rebootstrap everything. This includes manual
> > bootstrapping of self-dependent languages (haskell, gnat, ...) and
> > manual handling of some dependencies loop. In addition it's something
> > which hasn't been done since the libc5 transition, so we might discover
> > some unexpected issues.
> 
> Why do you have to do that? Is it just like for rpm where the
> packaging system encodes the SONAME as a dependency? We would also
> need a manual bootstrap in Fedora because of this issue.

I assumed that both libc can't be used simultaneously, so that's
basically like bootstrapping a new architecture, except the manual
bootstrapping of self-dependent languages can be done more easily.

Cheers,
Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno  GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurel...@aurel32.net http://www.aurel32.net


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