A well-known problem at Mozilla is that, while most of our desktop users run Windows, most of Mozilla’s developers do not. There are a lot of problems that result from that, but one of the most frustrating to me is that sometimes those of us that actually use Windows for development find ourselves at a disadvantage when it comes to tooling or other productivity enhancers.

In many ways this problem is also a Catch-22: People don’t want to use Windows for many reasons, but tooling is big part of the problem. OTOH, nobody is motivated to improve the tooling situation if nobody is actually going to use them.

A couple of weeks ago my frustrations with the situation boiled over when I learned that our Cpp unit test suite could not log symbolicated call stacks, resulting in my filing of bug 1238305 and bug 1240605. Not only could we not log those stacks, in many situations we could not view them in a debugger either.

Due to the fact that PDB files consume a large amount of disk space, we don’t keep those when building from integration or try repositories. Unfortunately they are be quite useful to have when there is a build failure. Most of our integration builds, however, do include breakpad symbols. Developers may also explicitly request symbols for their try builds.

A couple of years ago I had begun working on a WinDbg debugger extension that was tailored to Mozilla development. It had mostly bitrotted over time, but I decided to resurrect it for a new purpose: to help WinDbg^* grok breakpad.

Enter mozdbgext

mozdbgext is the result. This extension adds a few commands that makes Win32 debugging with breakpad a little bit easier.

The original plan was that I wanted mozdbgext to load breakpad symbols and then insert them into the debugger’s symbol table via the IDebugSymbols3::AddSyntheticSymbol API. Unfortunately the design of this API is not well equipped for bulk loading of synthetic symbols: each individual symbol insertion causes the debugger to re-sort its entire symbol table. Since xul.dll’s quantity of symbols is in the six-figure range, using this API to load that quantity of symbols is prohibitively expensive. I tweeted a Microsoft PM who works on Debugging Tools for Windows, asking if there would be any improvements there, but it sounds like this is not going to be happening any time soon.

My original plan would have been ideal from a UX perspective: the breakpad symbols would look just like any other symbols in the debugger and could be accessed and manipulated using the same set of commands. Since synthetic symbols would not work for me in this case, I went for “Plan B:” Extension commands that are separate from, but analagous to, regular WinDbg commands.

I plan to continuously improve the commands that are available. Until I have a proper README checked in, I’ll introduce the commands here.

Loading the Extension

1. Use the .load command: .load <path_to_mozdbgext_dll>

Loading the Breakpad Symbols

1. Extract the breakpad symbols into a directory.
2. In the debugger, enter !bploadsyms <path_to_breakpad_symbol_directory>
3. Note that this command will take some time to load all the relevant symbols.

Working with Breakpad Symbols

Note: You must have successfully run the !bploadsyms command first!

As a general guide, I am attempting to name each breakpad command similarly to the native WinDbg command, except that the command name is prefixed by !bp.

• Stack trace: !bpk
• Find nearest symbol to address: !bpln <address> where address is specified as a hexadecimal value.

Downloading windbgext

I have pre-built binaries (32-bit, 64-bit) available for download.

Note that there are several other commands that are “roughed-in” at this point and do not work correctly yet. Please stick to the documented commands at this time.

^* When I write “WinDbg”, I am really referring to any debugger in the Debugging Tools for Windows package, including cdb.

Happy New Year!

I’m finally getting ‘round to writing about a nasty bug that I had to spend a bunch of time with in Q4 2015. It’s one of the more challenging problems that I’ve had to break and I’ve been asked a lot of questions about it. I’m talking about bug 1218473.

How This All Began

In bug 1213567 I had landed a patch to intercept calls to CreateWindowEx. This was necessary because it was apparent in that bug that window subclassing was occurring while a window was neutered (“neutering” is terminology that is specific to Mozilla’s Win32 IPC code).

While I’ll save a discussion on the specifics of window neutering for another day, for our purposes it is sufficient for me to point out that subclassing a neutered window is bad because it creates an infinite recursion scenario with window procedures that will eventually overflow the stack.

Neutering is triggered during certain types of IPC calls as soon as a message is sent to an unneutered window on the thread making the IPC call. Unfortunately in the case of bug 1213567, the message triggering the neutering was WM_CREATE. Shortly after creating that window, the code responsible would subclass said window. Since WM_CREATE had already triggered neutering, this would result in the pathological case that triggers the stack overflow.

For a fix, what I wanted to do is to prevent messages that were sent immediately during the execution of CreateWindow (such as WM_CREATE) from triggering neutering prematurely. By intercepting calls to CreateWindowEx, I could wrap those calls with a RAII object that temporarily suppresses the neutering. Since the subclassing occurs immediately after window creation, this meant that this subclassing operation was now safe.

Unfortunately, shortly after landing bug 1213567, bug 1218473 was filed.

Where to Start

It wasn’t obvious where to start debugging this. While a crash spike was clearly correlated with the landing of bug 1213567, the crashes were occurring in code that had nothing to do with IPC or Win32. For example, the first stack that I looked at was js::CreateRegExpMatchResult!

When it is just not clear where to begin, I like to start by looking at our correlation data in Socorro — you’d be surprised how often they can bring problems into sharp relief!

In this case, the correlation data didn’t disappoint: there was 100% correlation with a module called _etoured.dll. There was also correlation with the presence of both NVIDIA video drivers and Intel video drivers. Clearly this was a concern only when NVIDIA Optimus technology was enabled.

I also had a pretty strong hypothesis about what _etoured.dll was: For many years, Microsoft Research has shipped a package called Detours. Detours is a library that is used for intercepting Win32 API calls. While the changelog for Detours 3.0 points out that it has “Removed [the] requirement for including detoured.dll in processes,” in previous versions of the package, this library was required to be injected into the target process.

I concluded that _etoured.dll was most likely a renamed version of detoured.dll from Detours 2.x.

Following The Trail

Now that I knew the likely culprit, I needed to know how it was getting there. During a November trip to the Mozilla Toronto office, I spent some time debugging a test laptop that was configured with Optimus.

Knowing that the presence of Detours was somehow interfering with our own API interception, I decided to find out whether it was also trying to intercept CreateWindowExW. I launched windbg, started Firefox with it, and then told it to break as soon as user32.dll was loaded:

sxe ld:user32.dll

Then I pressed F5 to resume execution. When the debugger broke again, this time user32 was now in memory. I wanted the debugger to break as soon as CreateWindowExW was touched:

ba w 4 user32!CreateWindowExW

Once again I resumed execution. Then the debugger broke on the memory access and gave me this call stack:

nvd3d9wrap!setDeviceHandle+0x1c91
nvd3d9wrap!initialise+0x373
nvd3d9wrap!setDeviceHandle+0x467b
nvd3d9wrap!setDeviceHandle+0x4602
ntdll!LdrpCallInitRoutine+0x14
ntdll!LdrpRunInitializeRoutines+0x26f
ntdll!LdrpLoadDll+0x453
ntdll!LdrLoadDll+0xaa
mozglue!`anonymous namespace'::patched_LdrLoadDll+0x1b0
KERNELBASE!LoadLibraryExW+0x1f7
KERNELBASE!LoadLibraryExA+0x26
kernel32!LoadLibraryA+0xba
nvinit+0x11cb
nvinit+0x5477
nvinit!nvCoprocThunk+0x6e94
nvinit!nvCoprocThunk+0x6e1a
ntdll!LdrpCallInitRoutine+0x14
ntdll!LdrpRunInitializeRoutines+0x26f
ntdll!LdrpLoadDll+0x453
ntdll!LdrLoadDll+0xaa
mozglue!`anonymous namespace'::patched_LdrLoadDll+0x1b0
KERNELBASE!LoadLibraryExW+0x1f7
kernel32!BasepLoadAppInitDlls+0x167
kernel32!LoadAppInitDlls+0x82
USER32!ClientThreadSetup+0x1f9
USER32!__ClientThreadSetup+0x5
ntdll!KiUserCallbackDispatcher+0x2e
GDI32!GdiDllInitialize+0x1c
USER32!_UserClientDllInitialize+0x32f
ntdll!LdrpCallInitRoutine+0x14
ntdll!LdrpRunInitializeRoutines+0x26f
ntdll!LdrpLoadDll+0x453
ntdll!LdrLoadDll+0xaa
mozglue!`anonymous namespace'::patched_LdrLoadDll+0x1b0
KERNELBASE!LoadLibraryExW+0x1f7
firefox!XPCOMGlueLoad+0x23c
firefox!XPCOMGlueStartup+0x1d
firefox!InitXPCOMGlue+0xba
firefox!NS_internal_main+0x5c
firefox!wmain+0xbe
firefox!__tmainCRTStartup+0xfe
kernel32!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xe
ntdll!__RtlUserThreadStart+0x70
ntdll!_RtlUserThreadStart+0x1b

This stack is a gold mine of information. In particular, it tells us the following:

1. The offending DLLs are being injected by AppInit_DLLs (and in fact, Raymond Chen has blogged about this exact case in the past).

2. nvinit.dll is the name of the DLL that is injected by step 1.

3. nvinit.dll loads nvd3d9wrap.dll which then uses Detours to patch our copy of CreateWindowExW.

I then became curious as to which other functions they were patching.

Since Detours is patching executable code, we know that at some point it is going to need to call VirtualProtect to make the target code writable. In the worst case, VirtualProtect’s caller is going to pass the address of the page where the target code resides. In the best case, the caller will pass in the address of the target function itself!

I restarted windbg, but this time I set a breakpoint on VirtualProtect:

bp kernel32!VirtualProtect

I then resumed the debugger and examined the call stack every time it broke. While not every single VirtualProtect call would correspond to a detour, it would be obvious when it was, as the NVIDIA DLLs would be on the call stack.

The first time I caught a detour, I examined the address being passed to VirtualProtect: I ended up with the best possible case: the address was pointing to the actual target function! From there I was able to distill a list of other functions being hooked by the injected NVIDIA DLLs.

Putting it all Together

By this point I knew who was hooking our code and knew how it was getting there. I also noticed that CreateWindowEx is the only function that the NVIDIA DLLs and our own code were both trying to intercept. Clearly there was some kind of bad interaction occurring between the two interception mechanisms, but what was it?

I decided to go back and examine a specific crash dump. In particular, I wanted to examine three different memory locations:

1. The first few instructions of user32!CreateWindowExW;
2. The first few instructions of xul!CreateWindowExWHook; and
3. The site of the call to user32!CreateWindowExW that triggered the crash.

Of those three locations, the only one that looked off was location 2:

6b1f6611 56              push    esi
6b1f6612 ff15f033e975    call    dword ptr [combase!CClassCache::CLSvrClassEntry::GetDDEInfo+0x41 (75e933f0)]
6b1f6618 c3              ret
6b1f6619 7106            jno     xul!`anonymous namespace'::CreateWindowExWHook+0x6 (6b1f6621)
xul!`anonymous namespace'::CreateWindowExWHook:
6b1f661b cc              int     3
6b1f661c cc              int     3
6b1f661d cc              int     3
6b1f661e cc              int     3
6b1f661f cc              int     3
6b1f6620 cc              int     3
6b1f6621 ff              ???

Why the hell were the first six bytes filled with breakpoint instructions?

I decided at this point to look at some source code. Fortunately Microsoft publishes the 32-bit source code for Detours, licensed for non-profit use, under the name “Detours Express.”

I found a copy of Detours Express 2.1 and checked out the code. First I wanted to know where all of these 0xcc bytes were coming from. A quick grep turned up what I was looking for:

93
94
95
96
97
98
99

inline PBYTE detour_gen_brk(PBYTE pbCode, PBYTE pbLimit)
{
    while (pbCode < pbLimit) {
        *pbCode++ = 0xcc;   // brk;
    }
    return pbCode;
}

Now that I knew which function was generating the int 3 instructions, I then wanted to find its callers. Soon I found:

1247
1248
1249
1250
1251

#ifdef DETOURS_X86
    pbSrc = detour_gen_jmp_immediate(pTrampoline->rbCode + cbTarget, pTrampoline->pbRemain);
    pbSrc = detour_gen_brk(pbSrc,
                           pTrampoline->rbCode + sizeof(pTrampoline->rbCode));
#endif // DETOURS_X86

Okay, so Detours writes the breakpoints out immediately after it has written a jmp pointing to its trampoline.

Why is our hook function being trampolined?

The reason must be because our hook was installed first! Detours has detected that and has decided that the best place to trampoline to the NVIDIA hook is at the beginning of our hook function.

But Detours is using the wrong address!

We can see that because the int 3 instructions are written out at the beginning of CreateWindowExWHook, even though there should be a jmp instruction first.

Detours is calculating the wrong address to write its jmp!

Finding a Workaround

Once I knew what the problem was, I needed to know more about the why – only then would I be able to come up with a way to work around this problem.

I decided to reconstruct the scenario where both our code and Detours are trying to hook the same function, but our hook was installed first. I would then follow along through the Detours code to determine how it calculated the wrong address to install its jmp.

The first thing to keep in mind is that Mozilla’s function interception code takes advantage of hot-patch points in Windows. If the target function begins with a mov edi, edi prolog, we use a hot-patch style hook instead of a trampoline hook. I am not going to go into detail about hot-patch hooks here — the above Raymond Chen link contains enough details to answer your questions. For the purposes of this blog post, the important point is that Mozilla’s code patches the mov edi, edi, so NVIDIA’s Detours library would need to recognize and follow the jmps that our code patched in, in order to write its own jmp at CreateWindowExWHook.

Tracing through the Detours code, I found the place where it checks for a hot-patch hook and follows the jmp if necessary. While examining a function called detour_skip_jmp, I found the bug:

124

        pbNew = pbCode + *(INT32 *)&pbCode[1];

This code is supposed to be telling Detours where the target address of a jmp is, so that Detours can follow it. pbNew is supposed to be the target address of the jmp. pbCode is referencing the address of the beginning of the jmp instruction itself. Unfortunately, with this type of jmp instruction, target addresses are always relative to the address of the next instruction, not the current instruction! Since the current jmp instruction is five bytes long, Detours ends up writing its jmp five bytes prior to the intended target address!

I went and checked the source code for Detours Express 3.0 to see if this had been fixed, and indeed it had:

163

        PBYTE pbNew = pbCode + 5 + *(INT32 *)&pbCode[1];

That doesn’t do much for me right now, however, since the NVIDIA stuff is still using Detours 2.x.

In the case of Mozilla’s code, there is legitimate executable code at that incorrect address that Detours writes to. It is corrupting the last few instructions of that function, thus explaining those mysterious crashes that were seemingly unrelated code.

I confirmed this by downloading the binaries from the build that was associated with the crash dump that I was analyzing. [As an aside, I should point out that you need to grab the identical binaries for this exercise; you cannot build from the same source revision and expect this to work due to variability that is introduced into builds by things like PGO.]

The five bytes preceeding CreateWindowExHookW in the crash dump diverged from those same bytes in the original binaries. I could also make out that the overwritten bytes consisted of a jmp instruction.

In Summary

Let us now review what we know at this point:

• Detours 2.x doesn’t correctly follow jmps from hot-patch hooks;
• If Detours tries to hook something that has already been hot-patched (including legitimate hot patches from Microsoft), it will write bytes at incorrect addresses;
• NVIDIA Optimus injects this buggy code into everybody’s address spaces via an AppInit_DLLs entry for nvinit.dll.

How can we best distill this into a suitable workaround?

One option could be to block the NVIDIA DLLs outright. In most cases this would probably be the simplest option, but I was hesitant to do so this time. I was concerned about the unintended consequences of blocking what, for better or worse, is a user-mode component of NVIDIA video drivers.

Instead I decided to take advantage of the fact that we now know how this bug is triggered. I have modified our API interception code such that if it detects the presence of NVIDIA Optimus, it disables hot-patch style hooks.

Not only will this take care of the crash spike that started when I landed bug 1213567, I also expect it to take care of other crash signatures whose relationship to this bug was not obvious.

That concludes this episode of Bugs from Hell. Until next time…

There has been enough that has been said over the past week about WebExtensions that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write this post. As usual, I can’t seem to help myself. Note the usual disclaimer that this is my personal opinion. Further note that I have no involvement with WebExtensions at this time, so I write this from the point of view of an observer.

API? What API?

I shall begin with the proposition that the legacy, non-jetpack environment for addons is not an API. As ridiculous as some readers might consider this to be, please humour me for a moment.

Let us go back to the acronym, “API.” Application Programming Interface. While the usage of the term “API” seems to have expanded over the years to encompass just about any type of interface whatsoever, I’d like to explore the first letter of that acronym: Application.

An Application Programming Interface is a specific type of interface that is exposed for the purposes of building applications. It typically provides a formal abstraction layer that isolates applications from the implementation details behind the lower tier(s) in the software stack. In the case of web browsers, I suggest that there are two distinct types of applications: web content, and extensions.

There is obviously a very well defined API for web content. On the other hand, I would argue that Gecko’s legacy addon environment is not an API at all! From the point of view of an extension, there is no abstraction, limited formality, and not necessarily an intention to be used by applications.

An extension is imported into Firefox with full privileges and can access whatever it wants. Does it have access to interfaces? Yes, but are those interfaces intended for applications? Some are, but many are not. The environment that Gecko currently provides for legacy addons is analagous to an operating system running every single application in kernel mode. Is that powerful? Absolutely! Is that the best thing to do for maintainability and robustness? Absolutely not!

Somewhere a line needs to be drawn to demarcate this abstraction layer and improve Gecko developers’ ability to make improvements under the hood. Last week’s announcement was an invitation to addon developers to help shape that future. Please participate and please do so constructively!

WebExtensions are not Chrome Extensions

When I first heard rumors about WebExtensions in Whistler, my source made it very clear to me that the WebExtensions initiative is not about making Chrome extensions run in Firefox. In fact, I am quite disappointed with some of the press coverage that seems to completely miss this point.

Yes, WebExtensions will be implementing some APIs to be source compatible with Chrome. That makes it easier to port a Chrome extension, but porting will still be necessary. I like the Venn Diagram concept that the WebExtensions FAQ uses: Some Chrome APIs will not be available in WebExtensions. On the other hand, WebExtensions will be providing APIs above and beyond the Chrome API set that will maintain Firefox’s legacy of extensibility.

Please try not to think of this project as Mozilla taking functionality away. In general I think it is safe to think of this as an opportunity to move that same functionality to a mechanism that is more formal and abstract.