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Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 22:29:53 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: isatty false positives and device state clobbering
As can be seen by strace, the TCGETS ioctl used by
isatty/fdopen/__stdout_write to determine whether a file descriptor is
a terminal is aliased by the SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE ioctl for OSS sound
devices. This is an utterly stupid legacy mistake, but it means the
ioctl could spuriously succeed and change the state (time base) of a
midi sequencer device when it's intended just to query whether the
device is a terminal.
Even though it's unlikely to arise in practice, I'd like to find a
clean solution to the problem. I see two general approaches:
1. Use fstat first and blacklist the sound device major before using
the ioctl, or even hard-code a list of tty majors and determine
positive tty status by device number.
2. Find an ioctl that doesn't clash with OSS (or anything else, but
OSS is the only driver I know with this bogus ioctl space collision
with ttys) and that doesn't change the tty state, and use that
instead.
I strongly prefer strategy 2; hard-coding device numbers seems really
backwards and precludes portability of source/binaries to platforms
that provide identical names and userspace API/ABI but different
device numbering.
OSS seems to use the range 0x5401 to 0x5408, so some possible
candidates for strategy 2 seem to be:
#define TIOCGPGRP 0x540F
#define TIOCOUTQ 0x5411
#define TIOCGWINSZ 0x5413
#define FIONREAD 0x541B
Perhaps TIOCGPGRP is best if it works for ttys that aren't the
controlling tty for a process group, since it corresponds to a
standard POSIX feature and would need to be present on any system
where the tcgetpgrp() is implemented via ioctl. The others are
nonstandard but widely supported extensions for querying terminal
buffer state and window size.
It's also worth checking whether these are defined differently on any
particular archs (e.g. mips, uhg) and whether the definitions there
might clash with OSS ioctl numbers, in which case selecting a
different one would be preferable.
Rich
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