Portability: Don’t Make va_list Assumptions

A few weeks ago I was porting some of my older code from x86 to AMD64 (that is, 32-bit to native 64-bit). It compiled fine, but crashed on startup. The backtrace looked like this:

(gdb) bt
#0 0x000000391256fd00 in strlen () from /lib64/tls/libc.so.6
#1 0x00000039125428cc in vfprintf () from /lib64/tls/libc.so.6
#2 0x000000391253f289 in buffered_vfprintf () from /lib64/tls/libc.so.6
#3 0x000000391253f469 in vfprintf () from /lib64/tls/libc.so.6

I found the mistake quickly, and it was one I should not have made. In fact, I had left in a comment: “This will probably break on other platforms, but I’m too lazy to fix it now.” I was making assumptions about va_list. Take the following little program as a demonstration:

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#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
 
void logmessage(const char *fmt, ...)
{
    va_list ap;
 
    va_start(ap, fmt);
    vfprintf(stdout, fmt, ap);
    vfprintf(stderr, fmt, ap);
    va_end(ap);
}
 
int main()
{
    logmessage("%s %s %s\n", "a", "b", "c");
    return 0;
}

On x86, this program outputs:
a b c
a b c

On my Linux AMD64 machine, it outputs:
a b c
(null) H«Ùÿ

The AMD64 build fails because va_list is not guaranteed to be a pass-by-value structure. On x86, va_list is just a stack pointer. The pointer gets passed by value, and thus the first vfprintf() call does not modify the value on logmessage‘s stack. On AMD64, GCC passes va_list by-reference. Therefore the first vfprintf() affected the value on the stack, and the second vfprintf() started reading parameter information past the usable endpoint.

Linux provides a macro called va_copy to deal with this, and the new code becomes:

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void logmessage(const char *fmt, ...)
{
    va_list ap;
    va_list ap2;
 
    va_start(ap, fmt);
    va_copy(ap2, ap);
    vfprintf(stdout, fmt, ap);
    vfprintf(stderr, fmt, ap2);
    va_end(ap);
}

Why would it get passed byref on AMD64 and not on Linux? The reason is that AMD64 has a nutty scheme for passing parameters; the first six parameters get plopped in random registers. For some reason, GCC preserves this convention when using variadic arguments, and therefore its va_list is probably a more complicated structure to handle the parameter reading process.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft does not have a va_copy macro as far as I can tell. I don’t have an AMD64 version of Windows so I can’t verify this, but my guess is one of:

  • Their va_list can be copied through assignment (GCC forbids this).
  • Their va_list is just a stack pointer and the calling convention for variadics is changed.
  • There exists some other mechanism I haven’t seen, or there is a lack of such a mechanism.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that if you write code that you know will break when you port it, someday you will port it, and it will break.

20 thoughts on “Portability: Don’t Make va_list Assumptions

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    So, I am sort of confused. Why is it that vprintf works the first time on 64-bit native but the second time you get bulk memory?

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