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Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:30:21 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: some fixes to musl

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:19:10PM +0400, Vasiliy Kulikov wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 23:00 +0400, Solar Designer wrote:
> > Personally, I've been using different approaches to this in different
> > ones of my programs.  For musl, I think the "always check" approach may
> > be the better one.  Yes, the code size increase from those error
> > handling paths is unfortunate...  Some use of goto can make them smaller
> > and keep them out of the same cache lines with actually running code.
> 
> The problem here is that there might be no good way to handle errors
> of error handling code.  If we allocate resource A, then B, and B
> allocation fails, we should release A and return error code.  What to do
> if releasing A fails?  Return error code and leave A allocated
> (==leaked)?  Try to release it in a cycle (potential infinite loop)?
> Terminate the process (not expected by the caller)?
> 
> I don't have a good solution...

The good solution is to demand that kernel developers not create such
bugs and calling them out on it when they do...

Rich

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