microsoft / microsoft/mimalloc

preloaded mimalloc makes 'man' crash with weird error (linux)

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Dominant language
C
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Description

spinning off from https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc/issues/244

"FYI I also get a wacky error preloading mimalloc and trying to read a man page; `man: nroff: Bad system call (core dumped)` - considering how venerable and conservative nroff (groff) is I doubt it's embedding a custom malloc but we'll see."

"Rabbit-holing a little on a man/nroff issue, I do note that 'man' is fairly unusually linked against libseccomp.so and although I don't know much about libseccomp it describes itself as an 'interface to the Linux Kernel's syscall filtering mechanism' so I presume the underlying problem is an interaction between libseccomp and mimalloc..."

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the failure described with mimalloc preloaded while running man and nroff on Linux. Compare the behavior with and without LD_PRELOAD, then investigate the suspected interaction between libseccomp syscall filtering and mimalloc. Done means identifying the cause and documenting or fixing the crash, with a reproducible validation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c, linux
Domain
operating-systems, security
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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