In issue #2948 a crash was reported in processCommand(). Later Oran Agra
(@oranagra) traced the bug (in private chat) in the following sequence
of events:
1. Some maxmemory is set.
2. The slave is the currently active client and is executing PING or
REPLCONF or whatever a slave can send to its master.
3. freeMemoryIfNeeded() is called since maxmemory is set.
4. flushSlavesOutputBuffers() is called by freeMemoryIfNeeded().
5. During slaves buffers flush, a write error could be encoutered in
writeToClient() or sendReplyToClient() depending on the version of
Redis. This will trigger freeClient() against the currently active
client, so a segmentation fault will likely happen in
processCommand() immediately after the call to freeMemoryIfNeeded().
There are different possible fixes:
1. Add flags to writeToClient() (recent versions code base) so that
we can ignore the write errors, and use this flag in
flushSlavesOutputBuffers(). However this is not simple to do in older
versions of Redis.
2. Use freeClientAsync() during write errors. This works but changes the
current behavior of releasing clients ASAP when possible. Normally
we write to clients during the normal event loop processing, in the
writable client, where there is no active client, so no care must be
taken.
3. The fix of this commit: to detect that the current client is no
longer valid. This fix is a bit "ad-hoc", but works across all the
versions and has the advantage of not changing the remaining
behavior. Only alters what happens during this race condition,
hopefully.
bb21537596