Why doesn't ptrace SINGLESTEP work properly?

Question

I am trying to trace a little program using ptrace API. I figured out that every time the tracer is run, it produces bad results. This is the disassembly of short program that I want to trace:

$ objdump -d -M intel inc_reg16
inc_reg16:     file format elf32-i386

Disassembly of section .text:

08048060 <.text>:
 8048060:   b8 00 00 00 00          mov    eax,0x0
 8048065:   66 40                   inc    ax
 8048067:   75 fc                   jne    0x8048065
 8048069:   89 c3                   mov    ebx,eax
 804806b:   b8 01 00 00 00          mov    eax,0x1
 8048070:   cd 80                   int    0x80

and here is code of the tracer itself:

// ezptrace.c
#include <sys/user.h>
#include <sys/ptrace.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    pid_t child;
    child = fork();
    if (child == 0) {
        ptrace(PTRACE_TRACEME, 0, NULL, NULL);
        execv("inc_reg16", NULL);
    }
    else {

        int status;
        wait(&status);
        struct user_regs_struct regs;
        while (1) {
            ptrace(PTRACE_GETREGS, child, NULL, &regs);
            printf("eip: %x\n", (unsigned int) regs.eip);
            ptrace(PTRACE_SINGLESTEP, child, NULL, NULL);
            waitpid(child, &status, 0);
            if(WIFEXITED(status)) break;
        }
        printf("end\n");
    }
    return 0;
}

The tracer's job is to single step the inc_reg16 program and log address of each encountered processor instruction. When I run and check how many times the instruction 'inc ax' has been encountered, it occurs that the numbers are different each time the tracer is run:

$ gcc ezptrace.c -Wall -o ezptrace
$ ./ezptrace > inc_reg16.log
$ grep '8048065' inc_reg16.log | wc -l
65498

the second check:

$ ./ezptrace > inc_reg16.log
$ grep '8048065' inc_reg16.log | wc -l
65494

The problem is that above results should be both 65536, as the instruction 'inc ax' is executed exactly 65536 times. Now the question is: is there a mistake in my code or it's a matter of some bug in ptrace? Your help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I tried the same program under both virtualbox and vmware, it seems that only vmware has the correct result, whereas virtualbox has the same problem as you. I used the virtualbox 4.2.1.

Answer 2

eip is the address to the "current instruction" in user space. You need a ptrace(...PEEKDATA, ...), i.e. following ptrace(...GETREGS, ...), to obtain the actual instruction. Also keep in mind that, with ptrace(...PEEKDATA, ...) you always obtain a machine word, actual opcodes usually only occupy the low 16/32 bits of it.