this issue mainly affects PIE binaries and execution of programs via
direct invocation of the dynamic linker binary: depending on kernel
behavior, in these cases the initial brk may be placed at at location
where it cannot be extended, due to conflicting adjacent maps.

when brk fails, mmap is used instead to expand the heap. in order to
avoid expensive bookkeeping for managing fragmentation by merging
these new heap regions, the minimum size for new heap regions
increases exponentially in the number of regions. this limits the
number of regions, and thereby the number of fixed fragmentation
points, to a quantity which is logarithmic with respect to the size of
virtual address space and thus negligible. the exponential growth is
tuned so as to avoid expanding the heap by more than approximately 50%
of its current total size.

there is no reason to check the return value for setting errno, since
brk never returns errors, only the new value of the brk (which may be
the same as the old, or otherwise differ from the requested brk, on
failure).

it may be beneficial to eventually just eliminate this file and make
the syscalls inline in malloc.c.

I wrongly assumed the brk syscall would set errno, but on failure it
returns the old value of the brk rather than an error code.

if a multithreaded program became non-multithreaded (i.e. all other
threads exited) while one thread held an internal lock, the remaining
thread would fail to release the lock. the the program then became
multithreaded again at a later time, any further attempts to obtain
the lock would deadlock permanently.

the underlying cause is that the value of libc.threads_minus_1 at
unlock time might not match the value at lock time. one solution would
be returning a flag to the caller indicating whether the lock was
taken and needs to be unlocked, but there is a simpler solution: using
the lock itself as such a flag.

note that this flag is not needed anyway for correctness; if the lock
is not held, the unlock code is harmless. however, the memory
synchronization properties associated with a_store are costly on some
archs, so it's best to avoid executing the unlock code when it is
unnecessary.

the case where mem was already aligned is handled earlier in the
function now.

this bug was caught by the new footer-corruption check in realloc and
free.

if the block returned by malloc was already aligned to the desired
alignment, memalign's logic to split off the misaligned head was
incorrect; rather than writing to a point inside the allocated block,
it was overwriting the footer of the previous block on the heap with
the value 1 (length 0 plus an in-use flag).

fortunately, the impact of this bug was fairly low. (this is probably
why it was not caught sooner.) due to the way the heap works, malloc
will never return a block whose previous block is free. (doing so would
be harmful because it would increase fragmentation with no benefit.)
the footer is actually not needed for in-use blocks, except that its
in-use bit needs to remain set so that it does not get merged with
free blocks, so there was no harm in it being set to 1 instead of the
correct value.

however, there is one case where this bug could have had an impact: in
multi-threaded programs, if another thread freed the previous block
after memalign's call to malloc returned, but before memalign
overwrote the previous block's footer, the resulting block in the free
list could be left in a corrupt state. I have not analyzed the impact
of this bad state and whether it could lead to more serious
malfunction.

the sizes in the header and footer for a chunk should always match. if
they don't, the program has definitely invoked undefined behavior, and
the most likely cause is a simple overflow, either of a buffer in the
block being freed or the one just below it.

crashing here should not only improve security of buggy programs, but
also aid in debugging, since the crash happens in a context where you
have a pointer to the likely-overflowed buffer.

there are two motivations for this change. one is to avoid
gratuitously depending on a C11 symbol for implementing a POSIX
function. the other pertains to the documented semantics. C11 does not
define any behavior for aligned_alloc when the length argument is not
a multiple of the alignment argument. posix_memalign on the other hand
places no requirements on the length argument. using __memalign as the
implementation of both, rather than trying to implement one in terms
of the other when their documented contracts differ, eliminates this
confusion.

C11 has no requirement that the alignment be a multiple of
sizeof(void*), and in fact seems to require any "valid alignment
supported by the implementation" to work. since the alignment of char
is 1 and thus a valid alignment, an alignment argument of 1 should be
accepted.