Using the Redis Allocator in Rust

Gavrie Philipson | November 12, 2019, updated November 24, 2019 redisjson rust

Introduction

While developing redismodule-rs, the Rust API for writing Redis modules, I encountered the need to set up a custom memory allocator.

Normally, when a Rust program needs to allocate some memory, such as when creating a String or Vec instance, it uses the global allocator defined in the program. Since Redis modules are built as shared libraries to be loaded into Redis, Rust will use the System allocator, which is the default provided by the OS (using the libc malloc(3) function).

This behavior is problematic for several reasons.

First of all, Redis may not be using the system allocator at all, relying on jemalloc instead. The jemalloc allocator is an alternative to the system malloc that includes many tweaks to avoid fragmentation, among other features. If the module uses the system allocator and Redis uses jemalloc , the allocation behavior will be inconsistent.

Secondly, even if Redis always used the system allocator, memory allocated directly by the module would not be visible to Redis: it would not show up in commands such as info memory , and would not be influenced by cleanup operations performed by Redis such as eviction of keys.

For these reasons, the Redis Modules API provides hooks such as RedisModule_Alloc and RedisModule_Free . These are used much like the standard malloc and free calls, but make Redis aware of the allocated memory in addition to actually passing the call on to the memory allocator.

Using a Custom Allocator

Rust provides the option to define a custom memory allocator by providing a custom implementation of the GlobalAlloc trait:

We can use it by implementing the GlobalAlloc trait with our own methods that delegate the allocation to Redis. For this, we need a way to call the Redis Module API functions from Rust. That is a topic for another post, but in short we achieve this by using the bindgen crate to generate Rust bindings from the redismodule.h C header file.

The header file defines the functions as follows:

#define REDISMODULE_API_FUNC(x) (*x) void * REDISMODULE_API_FUNC (RedisModule_Alloc)(size_t bytes); void REDISMODULE_API_FUNC (RedisModule_Free)( void * ptr);

These functions, like the rest of the Modules API, are defined as function pointers. When calling the functions from Rust, we need to dereference the function pointer first, which we do using the unwrap() method. We also need to do some casting to match up the pointer types. Finally, we need to use the unsafe keyword since we dereference raw pointers, which is not allowed in safe Rust for good reasons:

use std::alloc::{GlobalAlloc, Layout}; use std::os::raw::c_void; struct RedisAlloc ; unsafe impl GlobalAlloc for RedisAlloc { unsafe fn alloc ( & self, layout: Layout ) -> * mut u8 { RedisModule_Alloc.unwrap()(layout.size()) as * mut u8 } unsafe fn dealloc ( & self, ptr: * mut u8 , _layout: Layout ) { RedisModule_Free.unwrap()(ptr as * mut c_void) } }

The Crash

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. When we build a module with this custom allocator and load it into Redis, it crashes on us. Redis does print a nice stack trace when it crashes, so let’s look at it:

$ redis-server --loadmodule ./target/debug/examples/libhello.dylib thread panicked while processing panic. aborting. ... Backtrace: 0 redis-server 0x000000010adce1dc logStackTrace + 110 1 redis-server 0x000000010adce562 sigsegvHandler + 236 2 libsystem_platform.dylib 0x00007fff5b95db3d _sigtramp + 29 3 ??? 0x0000000000000000 0x0 + 0 4 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af5af6d _ZN3std9panicking18continue_panic_fmt17h0e74ab2b215a1401E + 157 5 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af5ae69 rust_begin_unwind + 9 6 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af6ea3f _ZN4core9panicking9panic_fmt17h09741a3213dba543E + 63 7 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af6e984 _ZN4core9panicking5panic17hb4bc64e7f35c9151E + 100 8 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af53108 _ZN4core6option15Option$LT$T$GT$6unwrap17h66957b4d942a4d3cE + 56 9 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af4f8f3 _ZN76_$LT$redis_module..alloc..RedisAlloc$u20$as$u20$core..alloc..GlobalAlloc$GT$5alloc17h6588ea2d7520a3ebE + 35 ...

So, it looks like we had a null pointer dereference here ( 3 ??? 0x0000000000000000 0x0 + 0 ), but what are all these weird symbols starting with _ZN... ?

After a bit of searching, we find that this is the way Rust does name mangling: Unlike in C, and similarly to C++, in Rust multiple functions with the same name can coexist, since there are various namespace mechanisms such as modules and traits to distinguish them. To generate unique symbols that are C-compatible, the compiler mangles these to long and ugly unique names. To demangle these names back into the original, we can filter the output through rustfilt .

This gives us the following stack trace (uninteresting parts removed):

3 ??? 0x0000000000000000 0x0 + 0 ... 31 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af6e984 core::panicking::panic + 100 32 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af53108 core::option::Option<T>::unwrap + 56 33 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af4f8f3 <redis_module::alloc::RedisAlloc as core::alloc::GlobalAlloc>::alloc + 35 34 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af4cc8c __rg_alloc + 60 35 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af6e2f6 <alloc::vec::Vec<u8> as core::convert::From<&str>>::from + 38 36 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af4de54 <T as core::convert::Into<U>>::into + 36 37 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af4f57f std::ffi::c_str::CString::new + 47 38 libhello.dylib 0x000000010af40daa RedisModule_OnLoad + 58 39 redis-server 0x000000010adf97d9 moduleLoad + 118 40 redis-server 0x000000010adf9735 moduleLoadFromQueue + 69 41 redis-server 0x000000010ad94428 main + 1190 ...

It still took me a lot head-scratching and experimenting to figure it out, but here’s what happened:

The functions of the Redis modules API are accessed via C function pointers. Instead of relying on the dynamic linker to initialize these pointers, they are initialized explicitly by Redis as part of module initialization process.

As the stack trace shows, during the loading of the module we call the CString::new function. This standard library function allocates memory for a string. This, in turn, calls our allocator which would then call RedisModule_Alloc.unwrap()... to actually perform the allocation. This causes a chicken-and-egg problem. The Redis module is not ready yet, meaning our function pointers have not yet been initialized, so we can’t call the relevant API to perform the allocation.

The Solution

I try various approaches to solve this, but there seems to be no clean way to avoid the allocation during module initialization. The second best thing would be to use the standard allocator until the module is ready, and then switch to the custom one. However, Rust doesn’t allow changing the allocator at runtime so we can’t do that.

I end up adding a flag to the custom allocator that causes allocations to be passed through to the system allocator at startup. After the module initialization is complete, the flag is toggled so that further allocations are then performed via the Redis allocator. This solution still has edge cases—most importantly requiring that all previously allocated memory is freed before switching, otherwise that memory would leak. However, it’s good enough for our purposes.

Here is what the final code looks like:

use ...; use std::sync::atomic::{AtomicBool, Ordering::SeqCst}; pub struct RedisAlloc ; static USE_REDIS_ALLOC: AtomicBool = AtomicBool::new( false ); unsafe impl GlobalAlloc for RedisAlloc { unsafe fn alloc ( & self, layout: Layout ) -> * mut u8 { let use_redis = USE_REDIS_ALLOC.load(SeqCst); if use_redis { return raw::RedisModule_Alloc.unwrap()(layout.size()) as * mut u8 ; } System.alloc(layout) } unsafe fn dealloc ( & self, ptr: * mut u8 , layout: Layout ) { let use_redis = USE_REDIS_ALLOC.load(SeqCst); if use_redis { return raw::RedisModule_Free.unwrap()(ptr as * mut c_void); } System.dealloc(ptr, layout); } } pub fn use_redis_alloc () { USE_REDIS_ALLOC.store( true , SeqCst); eprintln ! ( "Now using Redis allocator" ); }

We add a static flag named USE_REDIS_ALLOC that determines whether we should use the Redis allocator or the system one. It’s important to guarantee safety when mutating static data, so we use an AtomicBool here that is false by default.

In the module initialization code, we call use_redis_alloc when the module is ready to use. At this point we can safely start using the Redis allocator, and all future allocations will be accounted for by Redis.