docs/ANDROID-MEMCHECK.TXT

ANDROID MEMORY CHECKER COMPONENT

The docs/ANDROID-MEMCHECK.TXT document contains description of a memory checker
implemented in the emulator

The memory checker is intended to catch simple memory access violations in the
emulated system, including:
- Memory leaks
- Attempts to free / reallocate invalid pointers (including pointers that have
  already been freed, or reallocated).
- Attempts to read from / write to areas outside of allocated blocks.

To provide this functionality, the memory checker works in conjunction with
an instrumented version of libc.so library used by the emulated system. Both,
emulator's memory checking, and libc's instrumentation are turned on by the
-memcheck command-line option. If this argument is omitted, libc.so will run in
the regular, not instrumented mode, and the emulator will not perform any
actions related to the memory checking.

The way emulator and instrumented libc.so work together is as such:
libc.so hooks up every memory allocation call (malloc, free, calloc, realloc,
and memalign). For each such call, libc sends a notification message to the
emulator, providing an allocation descriptor that contains information about
allocation block and operation that is being performed on this block. Emulator
and libc use a "magic page" that is set up in such a way that every write to
that page on the emulated system produces some sort of event in the emulator,
allowing emulator to receive data that emulated system has written to the "magic
page". For more info on that, see hw/android/goldfish/trace.c

In response to events, received from libc.so, emulator keep tracks of all blocks
that have been allocated from the heap on emulated system. Block descriptors are
kept in a per-process basis, so when a process exits, emulator can list all the
leaked blocks the process left behind.

When a free, or realloc operation is performed on the emulated system, emulator
can verify that the pointer passed to free/realloc matches the address of a
block recorded in the current process' descriptors table. This way emulator can
detect and report attempts to free/reallocate invalid pointers.

To detect read/write violations, emulator uses prefix and suffix guarding areas
that were added to the allocated blocks by the instrumented libc. To watch for
access violations, emulator instruments ld_/st_mmu routines to verify that
accessed memory doesn't belong to a guarding area of a block allocated in
context of the current process.

There are some tricky things like:
- invalidating every page containing allocated blocks every time anything has
  been read, or written to that page, so we can be sure that we don't miss AV
  on condition that page has been cached and ld_/st_mmu is omitted when
  accessing memory in that page.
- Keeping track of each thread calling stack, so when access violation is
  reported, we can pinpoint violation to precise location in the source code.
- etc.

All the code related to memory checking is guarded in emulator's code by
CONFIG_ANDROID_MEMCHECK macro, making it easy to spot changes related to it in the
sources.