Friday 4 September 2015

The Joys of Unix Programming: MAP_ANON(YMOUS)

I was trying to do a little late-night hacking last night on SuperGameHerm, the Game Boy emulator my friends and I are writing, and I hit an error in the memory mapper. Specifically, certain OSes that used to be named after cats don't like calling mmap on /dev/zero (neither does Android). I thought it was odd that it was falling back to that code in the first place, though, because Apple's Mac OS X — I mean, certain cat themed OS — has always supported MAP_ANON, and I confirmed that by going to man mmap on a Mac.

What was going on? I dug deeper and saw MAP_ANON was guarded in sys/mman.h, so CMake wasn't finding it and it was instead compiling our fallback code. And so I started digging up other issues related to big endian machines and realised that I had only tested OS X and FreeBSD on big endian, and never tested OS X or FreeBSD on little endian. So was my big mistake.

This is a comprehensive guide to How to Make MAP_ANON(YMOUS) Visible, for every OS I could find information on:

Mac OS X

On 10.3 and below, this is easy; it's always there! It is not guarded by any #ifdef.

On 10.5 and above, it is slighly harder; you must define _DARWIN_C_SOURCE to cause MAP_ANON to be visible in a public scope.

On 10.4 only, it's much harder! It is only protected by #ifndef _POSIX_C_SOURCE, so to use MAP_ANON against the 10.4 SDK, you must completely undefine _POSIX_C_SOURCE. You don't have any other choice.

I suppose that means my overall advice then is to use the 10.5 SDK no matter what, if you have a Leopard computer handy, because it can target as low as 10.0. Otherwise, use the Panther SDK included with Tiger's Xcode Tools. Don't ever use Tiger's SDK if you want MAP_ANON.

FreeBSD

Before 5.0, it's always visible, just as in OS X 10.3. There are no preprocessor options to show or hide MAP_ANON.

On 5.0 or above, the only way to cause MAP_ANON to be visible is to define __BSD_VISIBLE somewhere. Undefining _POSIX_C_SOURCE won't save you here.

Other BSDs (NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD)

It's never guarded. MAP_ANON is always available.

Solaris

I could only get my hands on OpenSolaris, but considering the header having a copyright date of 1989 (by AT&T), I can't imagine it's any different on Real Solaris (or Oracle Solaris). There are no guards here, either; that's to be expected since they invented the damn thing.

Linux

glibc: I don't understand /usr/include/bits in the slightest. It seems to be always available no matter what options I toss to clang, but it is guarded by.. __USE_MISC? I presume this is some sort of feature macro buried deep in glibc that I don't care about or understand.

musl: It's always available, at least on 1.1.11 which is what I have on my test box.

Android: After searching through their spaghetti of includes to get to the actual file that defines constants, it appears they are all completely unguarded, though that isn't surprising since it is Linux and embedded.

In conclusion

Perhaps it's best to avoid anonymous mmap(2) in applications that you want to actually be portable.