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Cuckoo pointers

A cuckoo pointer is a particularly nasty kind of bug to track down in a C/C++ program. I’ve only encountered two of them in the eleven or so years I’ve been using these languages, but when they occur it can be very difficult to understand what is going on. A cuckoo pointer starts life as an old fashioned dangling pointer – a reference to a object on the heap which has been deallocated. It becomes a cuckoo pointer if you are unlucky enough to allocate an object of the same type, at the same address as the old one. Got that? You’ve got some buggy code which hasn’t realised that the old object is now dead, but now suddenly down plops a new object right in its place.

Normally dangling pointers aren’t too tricky to track down. If you write to memory using one, you’ll almost certainly spectacularly trash a bit of memory and your program will die. But in the cuckoo pointer scenario, the write to memory will probably kinda make sense. If the heap object was a string, the cuckoo pointer will be doing string-like operations to the memory, and your program will probably continue running for a while.

You might argue that the chances of a new object of the same type being allocated at exactly the same address are pretty slim. That’d be true, up to a point, but if your heap implementation is using a block-allocator strategy, the chances shoot right up. A block allocator means that allocations of blocks of 8 bytes will come from a special pool of contiguous 8-byte blocks. There’s a seperate pool for each size of blocks – 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 – up to some maximum size. This is a fast way of allocating memory, because the regular structure means that only minimal bookkeeping is required. But under this scheme, the chances of an new object landing at the same address as a recently-freed object of the same type are much increased.

Why are cuckoo pointers so hard to track down? It is because your application will continue executing for a while after the initial error (the dangling pointer). The application will potentially crash a good while after that error, although at least the crash is likely to be in an object of the same type. It’s not too unlike a data race, where two threads are writing to the same bit of memory. Here you have two objects – one real, one not – existing in the same bit of memory.

How do you track down cuckoo pointers? Well, the first step is to realise that they exist! Then you can switch on the heap’s “do not reuse free’d memory blocks” option and see if that changes the behaviour of the program at all.

1 reply on “Cuckoo pointers”

Note also that the ‘electric fence’ malloc debugging library can be told to never allocate the same memory twice. I’ve only used it very briefly with C but I’m sure it can be used with C++’s ‘new/delete’ too. Of course, memory load spikes massively, so in large programs you may have to unit test seperate parts at a time.

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