When printf debugging is a luxury

Inserting printf() calls is often considered to be a primitive fallback when other debugging tools are not available, such as stack backtraces with source line numbers.

But there are some situations in low-level programming where most libc calls don't work and so even printf() and assert() are unavailable luxuries. This can happen:

• when libc is not properly initialised yet;
• when we writing code that is called by libc and cannot re-enter libc code;
• when we are in a signal handler;
• when only limited stack space is available;
• when we cannot allocate memory for some reason; or
• when we are not even linked to libc.

Here's a fragment of code that has come in handy in these situations. It provides a simple assert() implementation:

#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

static void debug(const char *msg) {
  write(2, msg, strlen(msg));
}

static void die(const char *msg) {
  debug(msg);
  _exit(1);
}

#define TO_STRING_1(x) #x
#define TO_STRING(x) TO_STRING_1(x)

#define assert(expr) {                                                        \
  if (!(expr)) die("assertion failed at " __FILE__ ":" TO_STRING(__LINE__)    \
                   ": " #expr "\n"); }

By using preprocessor trickery to construct the assertion failure string at compile time, it avoids having to format the string at runtime. So it does not need to allocate memory, and it doesn't need to do multiple write() calls (which can become interleaved with other output in the multi-threaded case).

Sometimes even libc's write() is a luxury. In some builds of GNU libc on Linux, glibc's syscall wrappers use the TLS register (%gs on i386) to fetch the address of a routine for making syscalls.

However, if %gs is not set up properly for some reason, this will fail. For example, for Native Client's i386 sandbox, %gs is set to a different value whenever sandboxed code is running, and %gs stays in this state if sandboxed code faults and triggers a signal handler. In Chromium's seccomp-sandbox, %gs is set to zero in the trusted thread.

In those situations we have to bypass libc and do the system calls ourselves. The following snippet comes from reference_trusted_thread.cc. The sys_*() functions are defined by linux_syscall_support.h, which provides wrappers for many Linux syscalls:

#include "linux_syscall_support.h"

void die(const char *msg) {
  sys_write(2, msg, strlen(msg));
  sys_exit_group(1);
}