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Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 11:16:32 -0600
From: William Pitcock <nenolod@...eferenced.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Why are stdin/stdout/stderr `FILE *const` in musl?
Hi,
On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 9:30 AM, CodingMarkus <CodingMarkus@...auska.name> wrote:
>> On 2018-02-02, at 16:01, Markus Wichmann <nullplan@....net> wrote:
>>
>> Why would you ever need a pointer to stdout or stderr?
What he wants is a pointer to the pointer itself.
> "Why would you ever need" is no valid argument. It’s no argument for anything and especially never an argument against anything.
>
> If I buy a toolset to paint my wall and I cannot use it to paint it green, then “why would you ever want to have a green wall” is simply no argument because it doesn’t matter why the person who bought the toolset wants a green wall or whether it’s a good idea to paint walls in green. This is a meta discusion that misses the actual point which is that the toolset won’t allow me to paint my wall green.
>
> Here is a real life code sample that breaks exactly because the reason I was pointing out, so apparently clang developers like green walls:
>
> https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/tree/main/llvm5/dynamiclibrary-fix-build-musl.patch?id=HEAD
>
> And that the people who themselves makes the currently second most successful open source compiler on the market act outside the C standard doesn’t sound very convincing to me. If in doubt, these people know the C standard better than I probably ever will.
Actually, that patch should not be necessary soon, thankfully.
Also stdin/stdout/stderr and many other objects provided by the libc
should never ever be considered explicit symbols. Only ISO C
functions should be considered explicit symbols. But overall, the
EXPLICIT_SYMBOL() stuff in LLVM is a massive hackjob and needs to just
be completely removed.
> And, of course, this affects other projects based on LLVM infrastructure, e.g. this one, which simply cannot be built on Alpine and that’s because of musl:
>
> https://github.com/avast-tl/retdec
>
> Even with that patch it cannot be built but that has other reasons and this time the problem is not a question related to any specs or standards but to the fact that LLVM expects functions like fseeko64 to either not be present (they don’t have to, they are non-standard) or to be present as real functions. In musl they are present but they are defines (tfeeko64 is a define to fseek and so on) and this is unexpected but I see no reason why it would not be allowed so here I can blame LLVM. There is also a fix for that BTW and the latest LLVM versions contain that fix already (but retdec bases on an older one).
>
> I’m only worried with how interchangeable musl is as a standard libc because the idea of a standard is that it guarantees compatibility. If there are ten libc libraries and they all conform to the same standard, then they should always be interchangeable and all code building with one of them should also build with the other nine. Every time this is not the case, there is a problem that needs to be fixed IMHO. In that case either nine of them are doing it right and one of them is doing it wrong or nine of them are doing it wrong and one of them is doing it right, well, guess what is more likely.
A lot of libcs are derived in part from the historical BSD libc
(including the GNU one etc). Thusly, it is possible that these libc
have a design that is informed by the state of the 1980s instead of
modern practice. It does not mean that any of the implementations are
doing it wrong.
> So in the end, the question is whether LLVM is using incorrect code here that simply doesn’t need to compile because it is broken (regardless if it’s syntactically correct) or whether musl should define stdX the same way all the other libraries are doing it.
It shouldn't, there are advantages to the current way it is done.
Anything that catches technically incorrect code is a major win from
security and overall robustness points of view.
William
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