Re: Unaligned accesses in sha1dc

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Martin Ågren [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 2 June 2017 at 10:51, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 2:15 AM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Martin Ågren [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I looked into this some more. It turns out it is possible to trigger
undefined behavior on "next". Here's what I did:
...

This "fixes" the problem:
...

diff --git a/sha1dc/sha1.c b/sha1dc/sha1.c
index 3dff80a..d6f4c44 100644
--- a/sha1dc/sha1.c
+++ b/sha1dc/sha1.c

@@ -66,9 +66,9 @@

...
With this diff, various tests which seem relevant for SHA-1 pass,
including t0013, and the UBSan-error is gone. The second diff is just
a monkey-patch. I have no reason to believe I will be able to come up
with a proper and complete patch for sha1dc. And I guess such a thing
would not really be Git's patch to carry, either. But at least Git
could consider whether to keep relying on undefined behavior or not.

There's a fair chance I've mangled the whitespace. I'm using gmail's
web interface... Sorry about that.

Thanks.  I see Marc Stevens is CC'ed in the thread, so I'd expect
that the final "fix" would come from his sha1collisiondetection
repository via Ævar.

In the meantime, I am wondering if it makes sense to merge the
earlier update with #ifdef ALLOW_UNALIGNED_ACCESS and #ifdef
SHA1DC_FORCE_LITTLEENDIAN for the v2.13.x maintenance track, which
would at least unblock those on platforms v2.13.0 did not work
correctly at all.

Ævar, thoughts?

I think we're mixing up several things here, which need to be untangled:

1) The sha1dc works just fine on most platforms even with undefined
behavior, as evidenced by 2.13.0 working.

Right, with "platform" meaning "combination of hardware-architecture
and compiler". Nothing can be said about how the current code behaves
on "x86". Such statements can only be made with regard to "x86 and
this or that compiler". Even then, short of studying the compiler
implementation/documentation in detail, one cannot be certain that
seemingly unrelated changes in Git don't make the code do something
else entirely.

I think you're veering into a theoretical discussion here that has
little to no bearing on the practicalities involved here.

Yes if something is undefined behavior in C the compiler &
architecture is free to do anything they want with it. In practice
lots of undefined behavior is de-facto standardized across various
platforms.

As far as I can tell unaligned access is one of those things. I don't
think there's ever been an x86 chip / compiler that would run this
code with any semantic differences when it comes to unaligned access,
and such a chip / compiler is unlikely to ever exist.

I'm not advocating that we rely on undefined behavior willy-nilly,
just that we should consider the real situation is (i.e. what actual
architectures / compilers are doing or are likely to do) as opposed to
the purely theoretical (if you gave a bunch of aliens who'd never
heard of our technology the ANSI C standard to implement from
scratch).

Here's a performance test of your patch above against p3400-rebase.sh.
I don't know how much these error bars from t/perf can be trusted.
This is over 30 runs with -O3:

- 3400.2: rebase on top of a lot of unrelated changes
  v2.12.0     : 1.25(1.10+0.06)
  v2.13.0     : 1.21(1.06+0.06) -3.2%
  origin/next : 1.22(1.04+0.07) -2.4%
  martin        : 1.23(1.06+0.07) -1.6%
- 3400.4: rebase a lot of unrelated changes without split-index
  v2.12.0     : 6.49(3.60+0.52)
  v2.13.0     : 8.21(4.18+0.55) +26.5%
  origin/next : 8.27(4.34+0.64) +27.4%
  martin        : 8.80(4.36+0.62) +35.6%
- 3400.6: rebase a lot of unrelated changes with split-index
  v2.12.0     : 6.77(3.56+0.51)
  v2.13.0     : 4.09(2.67+0.38) -39.6%
  origin/next : 4.13(2.70+0.36) -39.0%
  martin        : 4.30(2.80+0.32) -36.5%

And just your patch v.s. next:

- 3400.2: rebase on top of a lot of unrelated changes
  origin/next : 1.22(1.06+0.06)
  martin      : 1.22(1.06+0.05) +0.0%
- 3400.4: rebase a lot of unrelated changes without split-index
  origin/next : 7.54(4.13+0.60)
  martin      : 7.75(4.34+0.67) +2.8%
- 3400.6: rebase a lot of unrelated changes with split-index
  origin/next : 4.19(2.92+0.31)
  martin      : 4.14(2.84+0.39) -1.2%

It seems to be a bit slower, is that speedup worth the use of
unaligned access? I genuinely don't know. I'm just interested to find
what if anything we need to urgently fix in a release version of git.

One data point there is that the fallback blk-sha1 implementation
we've shipped since 2009 has the same errors about unaligned access as
before your patch with -fsanitize[..], and looking at the commit
message this was something Linus knew about at the time, see
d7c208a92e ("Add new optimized C 'block-sha1' routines", 2009-08-05).

That's strong empirical data suggesting that whatever we want to do
about unaligned access in the future it's not something which in
practice would cause wrong sha1 results for the implementation
shipping with v2.13.0.

As an aside, when I was trying to apply your patch I made a mistake,
and found that git's test suite could run 100% OK with a bad sha1
implementation, I didn't apply this part (word diff):

diff --git a/sha1dc/sha1.c b/sha1dc/sha1.c
index 04b104fe58..d6f4c442b5 100644
--- a/sha1dc/sha1.c
+++ b/sha1dc/sha1.c

@@ -312 +312 @@ static void sha1_compression_W(uint32_t ihv[5], const

uint32_t W[80])
void sha1_compression_states(uint32_t ihv[5], const
[-uint32_t-]{+uint8_t+} m[64], uint32_t W[80], uint32_t states[80][5])

@@ -1642 +1642 @@ static void sha1_recompression_step(uint32_t step,

uint32_t ihvin[5], uint32_t i
static void sha1_process(SHA1_CTX* ctx, const [-uint32_t-]{+uint8_t+} block[64])

diff --git a/sha1dc/sha1.h b/sha1dc/sha1.h
index 1d1d2b8d7c..1d181a1403 100644
--- a/sha1dc/sha1.h
+++ b/sha1dc/sha1.h

@@ -21 +21 @@ extern "C" {

void sha1_compression_states(uint32_t[5], const
[-uint32_t-]{+uint8_t+}[64], uint32_t[80], uint32_t[80][5]);