Serious Bug All Targets -- Please Read

Till Straumann strauman at slac.stanford.edu
Tue Mar 3 03:37:27 UTC 2009


Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> Till Straumann wrote:
>> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>> Till Straumann wrote:
>>>> Hmm - AFAIK, c99 doesn't specify the exact representation
>>>> of 'bool' / '_Bool'. It only says that
>>>>
>>>> "An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the 
>>>> values 0 and 1"
>>>>
>>>> Hence, there is no really safe way to access such
>>>> an object from assembly code.
>>> Exactly.
>>>
>>>> I wonder if it wouldn't be better to change the
>>>> type of _Context_Switch_necessary & friends
>>>> to a type of known width.
>>> IMO, no.
>>>
>>> We should change to code into something which doesn't need to know 
>>> the size of a type, rsp. automatically gets it right.
>> So how would you do that given the requirement
>> that these variables need to be available to
>> assembly code, maybe w/o a stack available?
> E.g. by rewriting the code in question in C
That's what the new PPC framework does.
> w/ inline asm. This isn't always possible, but is possible on many 
> occasions, even when  stack is not available.
w/o stack I'm not sure...
> It also somewhat (not always) helps to catch such size mismatches early.
>
> Another possibility would be not to use _Bool for them (Which is the 
> type GCC interally uses), but to use an "int"
Well - that's what I originally proposed (int32_t actually).

IMO changing the type of these critical variables from bool -> int32_t
is least intrusive and probably the best solution for a 4.9.2
release.

T.
> or a dedicated typedef to another size-expansion compatible type (I.e. 
> any other ordinal type - _Bool is an ordinal type).
>
> Ralf
>




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