bug#54557: “fakechroot” execution engine doesn’t work for Bash

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi Ludovic,

Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr> writes:

[...]

> The message comes from ld.so.  My guess is that the problem comes from
> Bash’s terrible ‘malloc’ replacement:
>

[...]

> [Time passes…]  I confirmed this hypothesis by running:
>
>   guix pack -RR -S /bin=bin -m manifest.scm
>
> on this manifest:
>
> (use-modules (guix) (guix utils)
>              (guix profiles)
>              (gnu packages bash))
>
> (define bash-sans-malloc
>   (package/inherit bash
>     (name "bash-sans-malloc")
>     (arguments
>      (substitute-keyword-arguments (package-arguments bash)
>        ((#:configure-flags flags ''())
>         `(cons "--without-bash-malloc" ,flags))))))
>
> (packages->manifest (list bash-sans-malloc))
>
>
> Works just fine:
>
> $ unshare -mrf sh -c 'mount -t tmpfs -o ro none /gnu/store; 
> GUIX_EXECUTION_ENGINE=fakechroot /tmp/pack/bin/bash --version'
> GNU bash, version 5.1.8(1)-release (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
> Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

[...]

> Perhaps we should build Bash ‘--without-bash-malloc’ unconditionally in
> ‘core-updates’?  The ‘INSTALL’ file reads:
>
> '--with-bash-malloc'
>      Use the Bash version of 'malloc' in the directory 'lib/malloc'.
>      This is not the same 'malloc' that appears in GNU libc, but an
>      older version originally derived from the 4.2 BSD 'malloc'.  This
>      'malloc' is very fast, but wastes some space on each allocation.
>      This option is enabled by default.  The 'NOTES' file contains a
>      list of systems for which this should be turned off, and
>      'configure' disables this option automatically for a number of
>      systems.
>
> There might be other options if we want to keep it, such as changing the
> ELF visibility of those symbols, but I wonder if it’s worth the effort.
>
> Thoughts?

I'd be OK with --without-bash-malloc; it seems we'll pay a bit in terms
of Bash performance in exchange for better memory usage.  It also brings
benefits such as solving this issue and may benefit from
advances/bugfixes to glibc's malloc in the future, if there are any.

Well done investigating!

Maxim