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Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:20:10 +0100
From: Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@...t70.net>
To: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
Cc: Alexander Monakov <amonakov@...ras.ru>,
"musl@...ts.openwall.com" <musl@...ts.openwall.com>,
Andy Caldwell <andycaldwell@...rosoft.com>
Subject: Re: RE: [EXTERNAL] Re: [PATCH] fix avoidable segfault
in catclose
* Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> [2024-01-27 09:56:08 -0500]:
> On Sat, Jan 27, 2024 at 03:58:02PM +0300, Alexander Monakov wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 27 Jan 2024, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> >
> > > > Yes, this - the details aren't particularly interesting but the key is that "invoke UB"
> > > > is not the same as "crash/trap". I'm also contrasting this to the comments in the
> > > > glibc wiki and Markus's synopsis (from the earlier email) that "it has been musl policy
> > > > to crash on invalid args since the beginning" - in the face of UB, musl (and presumably
> > > > also glibc) _doesn't_ crash/trap, nor does it "fail early and catastrophically" it
> > > > instead "propagates the UB". In debug builds these are often equivalent, but the
> > > > specific path to UB might not be seen in a debug build, and only be seen in production
> > > > where the non-locality of UB effects are at their worst.
> > >
> > > i think you are still looking at this the wrong way:
> > >
> > > - the original code has ub.
> > > - so anything can happen.
> > > - whatever libc does, still anything can happen.
> > > - adding a check p==-1 in libc does not change anything.
> > > (the ub already happens in the caller. a compiler can even remove the
> > > call since it can know about catclose semantics.)
> > >
> > > given these facts on the theoretical level, we can look pragmatically at
> > > the actual transformations a compiler would likely do and we find that
> > > an invalid NULL+n dereference in practice is almost surely an immediate
> > > crash (on linux with dynamic linking or static linking without lto this
> > > is not only likely but actually guaranteed by existing toolchains) which
> > > is the best possible outcome for debugging, meanwhile an extra check in
> > > libc is worse: the code continues and misbehaves somewhere else.
> >
> > I don't think this follows. I believe the suggestion was to have
> >
> > if (catd == (nl_catd)-1) a_crash();
> >
> > which is the opposite of "continuing and misbehaving".
>
> Indeed, that was my understanding too. The reason I don't like this is
> that it's a lot of spurious code (not in a single place, but if we did
sorry i thought we were debating 'return EBADF'.
> stuff like this consistently everywhere) and on top of that it
> actively makes debugging more difficult. You have to trace the flow of
> execution from the trapping instruction back to the branch that led to
> it and figure out why that was taken rather than seeing the invalid
in a sense this is still 'continue and misbehave somewhere else':
if many code paths end in a_crash and the compiler merges them,
then we can lose the branch location, so we would need an a_crash
that the compiler does not merge to be able to find the branch.
> pointer directly in the instruction operand register (and knowing even
> before you see it, e.g. just with strace not even gdb, that the cause
> was an invalid pointer).
>
> Rich
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