fprintf doesn't print const char * to file - char

I have a simple log function that needs to print the current date and time. I'm doing it inside a function that returns a char *. When I try to set this char * into fprintf(), it doesn't print me the string into the file: why?
Here is the function that constructs the date-time:
char * UT::CurrentDateTime()
{
char buffer [50];
time_t t = time(0); // get time now
struct tm * now = localtime( & t );
int n=sprintf(buffer, "%d:%d:%d %d:%d:%d:", (now->tm_year + 1900),
(now->tm_mon + 1), now->tm_mday, now->tm_hour, now->tm_min,
now->tm_sec);
return buffer;
}
Here is the log:
const char *time =__TIME__; // compilation time
char *currentTime = UT::CurrentDateTime(); // it's a static method; also tried to set it to const
fprintf(fp, "%s %s %s %s %s %d %s\n", __TIME__, pType, __DATE__,
currentTime, pFileName, lineNo, pMsg.c_str());
fflush(fp);
Every thing is printed except the date/time char *.
Why?

char * UT::CurrentDateTime()
{
char buffer [50];
/* ... */
return buffer;
}
You've returned a pointer to a memory buffer that dies immediately. Any function that uses the pointer returned from CurrentDateTime() is relying upon garbage.
Your compiler should have warned you about this. Disregard your compiler warnings at your own peril.
Instead, either allocate this via char *buffer = malloc(50 * sizeof char); or use C++'s memory allocation mechanisms to allocate memory that can live longer than the time the function is 'live' and running.

Related

Cannot printk user space string parameter when intercepting a syscall

I'm trying to intercept a Linux syscall to record all opened filename to a log file. but there's a problem: it failed to printk the filename in user space. Here are the codes of fake syscall function:
static inline long hacked_open(const char __user *filename, int flags, umode_t mode)
{
char buf[256];
buf[255] = '\0';
long res = strncpy_from_user(buf, filename, 255);
if (res > 0)
printk("%s\n", buf);
else
printk("---err len : %ld ---\n", res);
orig_func a = (orig_func)orig_open;
return a(filename, flags, mode);
}
after I loaded the kernel module, dmesg showed a lot of message as:
---err len : -14---
I've tried copy_from_user and printk the filename directly, but they all doesn't work.
I've solved this problem by myself.
the parameters of hacked_open are wrong.
the correct hacked_openat should be :
asmlinkage long hacked_openat(struct pt_regs *regs)
and we can get filename from user-space like this:
int nRet = strncpy_from_user(filename, (char __user *)regs->si, 1024);

copy_from_user is fetching unexpected data

I want to use the write sycall for copying a struct
from userspace to kernel.
In both user and kernel space, the struct is defined as
struct packet{
unsigned char packet[256];
int length;
}__attribute__ ((packed));
User space uses a local variable of type struct packet and passes it to the write syscall.
struct packet p;
/* ... (fill in data) */
printf("packet.length: %d\n",packet.length); /* looks correct */
result = write(uartFD, &p, sizeof(struct packet));
The kernel side looks like this, checking for correct length is done, just removed from example.
/* write syscall */
ssize_t packet_write(
struct file *file_ptr,
const char __user *user_buffer,
size_t count, loff_t *position)
{
struct packet p;
int retval;
if (copy_from_user((void*)&p, user_buffer, sizeof(struct packet))){
retval = -EACCES;
goto err;
}
/* looks wrong - different numbers like 96373062 or 96373958 */
printk("packet length: %d\n",p.length);
The opposite direction using read sycall is working as expected:
/* read syscall */
struct packet p;
/* ... (fill in data) */
copy_to_user(user_buffer, (void*)&p, sizeof(struct packet));
/* userspace */
read(uartFD, (void*)&packet, sizeof(struct packet));
What am I doing wrong with write syscall?
(Posted on behalf of the OP).
This is solved - it was my own silly. Both copying an integer and an unsigned char buffer separately was working, so it had to be something about the struct.
One site was packed, the other was not... reusing old code...

As one MPI process executes MPI_Barrier(), other processes hang

I have an MPI program for having multiple processes read from a file that contains list of file names and based on the file names read - it reads the corresponding file and counts the frequency of words.
If one of the processes completes this and returns - to block executing MPI_Barrier(), the other processes also hang. On debugging, it could be seen that the readFile() function is not entered by the processes currently in process_files() Unable to figure out why this happens. Please find the code below:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <mpi.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <string.h>
#include "hash.h"
void process_files(char*, int* , int, hashtable_t* );
void initialize_word(char *c,int size)
{
int i;
for(i=0;i<size;i++)
c[i]=0;
return;
}
char* readFilesList(MPI_File fh, char* file,int rank, int nprocs, char* block, const int overlap, int* length)
{
char *text;
int blockstart,blockend;
MPI_Offset size;
MPI_Offset blocksize;
MPI_Offset begin;
MPI_Offset end;
MPI_Status status;
MPI_File_open(MPI_COMM_WORLD,file,MPI_MODE_RDONLY,MPI_INFO_NULL,&fh);
MPI_File_get_size(fh,&size);
/*Block size calculation*/
blocksize = size/nprocs;
begin = rank*blocksize;
end = begin+blocksize-1;
end+=overlap;
if(rank==nprocs-1)
end = size;
blocksize = end-begin+1;
text = (char*)malloc((blocksize+1)*sizeof(char));
MPI_File_read_at_all(fh,begin,text,blocksize,MPI_CHAR, &status);
text[blocksize+1]=0;
blockstart = 0;
blockend = blocksize;
if(rank!=0)
{
while(text[blockstart]!='\n' && blockstart!=blockend) blockstart++;
blockstart++;
}
if(rank!=nprocs-1)
{
blockend-=overlap;
while(text[blockend]!='\n'&& blockend!=blocksize) blockend++;
}
blocksize = blockend-blockstart;
block = (char*)malloc((blocksize+1)*sizeof(char));
block = memcpy(block, text + blockstart, blocksize);
block[blocksize]=0;
*length = strlen(block);
MPI_File_close(&fh);
return block;
}
void calculate_term_frequencies(char* file, char* text, hashtable_t *hashtable,int rank)
{
printf("Start File %s, rank %d \n\n ",file,rank);
fflush(stdout);
if(strlen(text)!=0||strlen(file)!=0)
{
int i,j;
char w[100];
i=0,j=0;
while(text[i]!=0)
{
if((text[i]>=65&&text[i]<=90)||(text[i]>=97&&text[i]<=122))
{
w[j]=text[i];
j++; i++;
}
else
{
w[j] = 0;
if(j!=0)
{
//ht_set( hashtable, strcat(strcat(w,"#"),file),1);
}
j=0;
i++;
initialize_word(w,100);
}
}
}
return;
}
void readFile(char* filename, hashtable_t *hashtable,int rank)
{
MPI_Status stat;
MPI_Offset size;
MPI_File fx;
char* textFromFile=0;
printf("Start File %d, rank %d \n\n ",strlen(filename),rank);
fflush(stdout);
if(strlen(filename)!=0)
{
MPI_File_open(MPI_COMM_WORLD,filename,MPI_MODE_RDONLY,MPI_INFO_NULL,&fx);
MPI_File_get_size(fx,&size);
printf("Start File %s, rank %d \n\n ",filename,rank);
fflush(stdout);
textFromFile = (char*)malloc((size+1)*sizeof(char));
MPI_File_read_at_all(fx,0,textFromFile,size,MPI_CHAR, &stat);
textFromFile[size]=0;
calculate_term_frequencies(filename, textFromFile, hashtable,rank);
MPI_File_close(&fx);
}
printf("Done File %s, rank %d \n\n ",filename,rank);
fflush(stdout);
return;
}
void process_files(char* block, int* length, int rank,hashtable_t *hashtable)
{
char s[2];
s[0] = '\n';
s[1] = 0;
char *file;
if(*length!=0)
{
/* get the first file */
file = strtok(block, s);
/* walk through other tokens */
while( file != NULL )
{
readFile(file,hashtable,rank);
file = strtok(NULL, s);
}
}
return;
}
void execute_process(MPI_File fh, char* file, int rank, int nprocs, char* block, const int overlap, int * length, hashtable_t *hashtable)
{
block = readFilesList(fh,file,rank,nprocs,block,overlap,length);
process_files(block,length,rank,hashtable);
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
/*Initialization*/
MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);
MPI_File fh=0;
int rank,nprocs,namelen;
char *block=0;
const int overlap = 70;
char* file = "filepaths.txt";
int *length = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
hashtable_t *hashtable = ht_create( 65536 );
MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &rank);
MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &nprocs);
char processor_name[MPI_MAX_PROCESSOR_NAME];
MPI_Get_processor_name(processor_name, &namelen);
printf("Rank %d is on processor %s\n",rank,processor_name);
fflush(stdout);
execute_process(fh,file,rank,nprocs,block,overlap,length,hashtable);
printf("Rank %d returned after processing\n",rank);
MPI_Barrier(MPI_COMM_WORLD);
MPI_Finalize();
return 0;
}
The filepaths.txt is a file that contain the absolute file names of normal text files:
eg:
/home/mpiuser/mpi/MPI_Codes/code/test1.txt
/home/mpiuser/mpi/MPI_Codes/code/test2.txt
/home/mpiuser/mpi/MPI_Codes/code/test3.txt
Your readFilesList function is pretty confusing, and I believe it doesn't do what you want it to do, but maybe I just do not understand it correctly. I believe it is supposed to collect a bunch of filenames out of the list file for each process. A different set for each process. It does not do that, but this is not the problem, even if this would do what you want it to, the subsequent MPI IO would not work.
When reading files, you use MPI_File_read_all with MPI_COMM_WORLD as communicator. This requires all processes to participate in reading this file. Now, if each process should read a different file, this obviously is not going to work.
So there are several issues with your implementation, though I can not really explain your described behavior, I would rather first start off and try to fix them, before debugging in detail, what might go wrong.
I am under the impression, you want to have an algorithm along these lines:
Read a list of file names
Distribute that list of files equally to all processes
Have each process work on its own set of files
Do something with the data from this processing
And I would suggest to try this with the following approach:
Read the list on a single process (no MPI IO)
Scatter the list of files to all processes, such that all get around the same amount of work
Have each process work on its list of files independently and in serial (serial file access and processing)
Some data reduction with MPI, as needed
I believe, this would be the best (easiest and fastest) strategy in your scenario. Note, that no MPI IO is involved here at all. I don't think doing some complicated distributed reading of the file list in the first step would result in any advantage here, and in the actual processing it would actually be harmful. The more independent your processes are, the better your scalability usually.

CUDA constant memory issue: invalid device symbol with cudaGetSymbolAddress

I am trying to set constant values on my GPU's constant memory before launching a kernel which needs these values.
My code (simplified):
__constant__ size_t con_N;
int main()
{
size_t N;
size_t* dev_N = NULL;
cudaError_t cudaStatus;
//[...]
cudaStatus = cudaGetSymbolAddress((void **)&dev_N, &con_N);
if (cudaStatus != cudaSuccess) {
cout<<"cudaGetSymbolAddress (dev_N) failed: "<<cudaGetErrorString(cudaStatus)<<endl;
}
I planned to cudaMemcpy my N to dev_N afterwards.
However, all I get at this point in the code is:
cudaGetSymbolAddress (dev_N) failed: invalid device symbol
I'm working with CUDA 6.5 so it's not a quoted symbol issue, as it is in most of the Q&A I've been checking so far.
I tried to replace con_N with con_N[1] (and remove the & before con_N in cudaGetSymbolAddress parameters): same result.
As the prototype of this function is cudaGetSymbolAddress(void **devPtr , const void* symbol ), I guessed it wanted to be given my symbol's address. However, I tried with cudaStatus = cudaGetSymbolAddress((void **)&dev_N, (const void*) con_N); and I got the same message.
I'm also getting the very same error message when I remove cudaGetSymbolAddress((void **)&dev_N, &con_N) and go directly with cudaMemcpyToSymbol(&con_N, &N, sizeof(size_t)) instead.
I'm afraid I missed something essential. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
The correct usage of cudaGetSymbolAddress is
cudaGetSymbolAddress((void **)&dev_N, con_N)
I'm showing this with the simple example below.
As the documentation explains, the symbol should physically reside on the device. Accordingly, using &con_N in the API call appears to be meaningless, since, being cudaGetSymbolAddress a host API, accessing the address of something residing on the device directly from host should not be possible. I'm not sure if the prototype appearing in the CUDA Runtime API document should better read as `
template<class T>
cudaError_t cudaGetSymbolAddress (void **devPtr, const T symbol)
with device symbol reference instead of device symbol address.
#include <stdio.h>
__constant__ int const_symbol;
/********************/
/* CUDA ERROR CHECK */
/********************/
#define gpuErrchk(ans) { gpuAssert((ans), __FILE__, __LINE__); }
inline void gpuAssert(cudaError_t code, const char *file, int line, bool abort=true)
{
if (code != cudaSuccess)
{
fprintf(stderr,"GPUassert: %s %s %d\n", cudaGetErrorString(code), file, line);
if (abort) exit(code);
}
}
/***************/
/* TEST KERNEL */
/***************/
__global__ void kernel() {
printf("Address of symbol from device = %p\n", &const_symbol);
}
/********/
/* MAIN */
/********/
int main()
{
const int N = 16;
int *pointer = NULL;
gpuErrchk(cudaGetSymbolAddress((void**)&pointer, const_symbol));
kernel<<<1,1>>>();
printf("Address of symbol from host = %p\n", pointer);
return 0;
}
In my opinion, A line of your code should be fixed like below.
cudaStatus = cudaGetSymbolAddress((void **)&dev_N, con_N);
Hope this helps you.

Using an old device file for char device driver

I have two questions as I'm trying device drivers as a beginner.
I created one module , loaded it, it dynamically took major number 251 say. Number of minor devices is kept 1 only i.e minor number 0. For testing , I tried echo and cat on the device file (created using mknod) and it works as expected. Now if I unload the module but don't remove /dev entry and again load the module with same major number and try writing/reading to same device file which was used previously, kernel crashes. I know we shouldn't do this but just want to understand what happens in this scenario which causes this crash. I think something that VFS does.
When I do cat on device file, the read keeps on happening indefinitely. why? To stop that needed to use offset manipulation. This looks to be because buffer length is coming as 32768 as default to read?
EDIT: further in this I added one ioctl function as below, then I'm getting error regarding the storage class of init and cleanup function, which work well if no ioctl is defined. Not getting the link between ioctl and the init/cleanup functions' storage class. Updated code is posted. Errors are below:
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:95:12: error: invalid storage class for function ‘flow_init’
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c: In function ‘flow_init’:
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:98:2: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code [-Wdeclaration-after-statement]
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c: In function ‘flow_ioctl’:
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:112:13: error: invalid storage class for function ‘flow_terminate’
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:119:1: error: invalid storage class for function ‘__inittest’
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:119:1: warning: ‘alias’ attribute ignored [-Wattributes]
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:120:1: error: invalid storage class for function ‘__exittest’
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:120:1: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code [-Wdeclaration-after-statement]
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:120:1: warning: ‘alias’ attribute ignored [-Wattributes]
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:120:1: error: expected declaration or statement at end of input
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c: At top level:
/home/diwakar/Documents/my_modules/first_test_module/flowTest.c:73:13: warning: ‘flow_ioctl’ defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
Below is the code:
#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
#include <asm/uaccess.h>
#include <linux/cdev.h>
#include <linux/kdev_t.h>
#include <linux/errno.h>
#include <linux/ioctl.h>
#define SUCCESS 0
#define BUF_LEN 80
#define FLOWTEST_MAGIC 'f'
#define FLOW_QUERY _IOR(FLOWTEST_MAGIC,1,int)
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
int minor_num=0,i;
int num_devices=1;
int fopen=0,counter=0,ioctl_test;
static struct cdev ms_flow_cd;
static char c;
///// Open , close and rest of the things
static int flow_open(struct inode *f_inode, struct file *f_file)
{
printk(KERN_ALERT "flowtest device: OPEN\n");
return SUCCESS;
}
static ssize_t flow_read(struct file *f_file, char __user *buf, size_t
len, loff_t *off)
{
printk(KERN_INFO "flowtest Driver: READ()\nlength len=%d, Offset = %d\n",len,*off);
/* Check to avoid the infinitely printing on screen. Return 1 on first read, and 0 on subsequent read */
if(*off==1)
return 0;
printk(KERN_INFO "Copying...\n");
copy_to_user(buf,&c,1);
printk(KERN_INFO "Copied : %s\n",buf);
*off = *off+1;
return 1; // Return 1 on first read
}
static ssize_t flow_write(struct file *f_file, const char __user *buf,
size_t len, loff_t *off)
{
printk(KERN_INFO "flowtest Driver: WRITE()\n");
if (copy_from_user(&c,buf+len-2,1) != 0)
return -EFAULT;
else
{
printk(KERN_INFO "Length len = %d\n\nLast character written is - %c\n",len,*(buf+len-2));
return len;
}
}
static int flow_close(struct inode *i, struct file *f)
{
printk(KERN_INFO "ms_tty Device: CLOSE()\n");
return 0;
}
///* ioctl commands *///
static long flow_ioctl (struct file *filp,unsigned int cmd, unsigned long arg)
{
switch(cmd) {
case FLOW_QUERY:
ioctl_test=51;
return ioctl_test;
default:
return -ENOTTY;
}
///////////////////File operations structure below/////////////////////////
struct file_operations flow_fops = {
.owner = THIS_MODULE,
.llseek = NULL,
.read = flow_read,
.write = flow_write,
.unlocked_ioctl = flow_ioctl,
.open = flow_open,
.release = flow_close
};
static int flow_init(void)
{
printk(KERN_ALERT "Here with flowTest module ... loading...\n");
int result=0;
dev_t dev=0;
result = alloc_chrdev_region(&dev, minor_num,
num_devices,"mod_flowtest"); // allocate major number dynamically.
i=MAJOR(dev);
printk(KERN_ALERT "Major allocated = %d",i);
cdev_init(&ms_flow_cd,&flow_fops);
cdev_add(&ms_flow_cd,dev,1);
return 0;
}
static void flow_terminate(void)
{
dev_t devno=MKDEV(i,0); // wrap major/minor numbers in a dev_t structure , to pass for deassigning.
printk(KERN_ALERT "Going out... exiting...\n");
unregister_chrdev_region(devno,num_devices); //remove entry from the /proc/devices
}
module_init(flow_init);
module_exit(flow_terminate);
1- You're missing cdev_del() in your cleanup function. Which means the device stays registered, but the functions to handle it are unloaded, thus the crash. Also, cdev_add probably fails on the next load, but you don't know because you're not checking return values.
2- It looks ok... you modify offset, return the correct number of bytes, and then return 0 if offset is 1, which indicates EOF. But you should really check for *off >= 1.
EDIT-
The length passed into your read handler function comes all the way from user-land read(). If the user opens the device file and calls read(fd, buf, 32768);, that just means the user wants to read up to 32768 bytes of data. That length gets passed all the way to your read handler. If you don't have 32768 bytes of data to supply, you supply what you have, and return the length. Now, the user code isn't sure if that's the end of the file or not, so it tries for another 32768 read. You really have no data now, so you return 0, which tells the user code that it has hit EOF, so it stops.
In summary, what you're seeing as some sort of default value at the read handler is just the block size that the utility cat uses to read anything. If you want to see a different number show up at your read function, try using dd instead, since it lets you specify the block size.
dd if=/dev/flowtest of=/dev/null bs=512 count=1
In addition, this should read one block and stop, since you're specifying count=1. If you omit count=1, it will look more like cat, and try to read until EOF.
For 2, make sure you start your module as a char device when using mknod.
mknod /dev/you_device c major_number minor_number

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