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Date:      Wed, 13 Dec 2000 10:20:18 +0100
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
Cc:        kris@citusc.usc.edu, des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Safe string formatting in the kernel 
Message-ID:  <88311.976699218@critter>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 13 Dec 2000 09:06:07 GMT." <200012130906.CAA27235@usr08.primenet.com> 

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In message <200012130906.CAA27235@usr08.primenet.com>, Terry Lambert writes:
>> >I've been a fan of this approach, ever since I fixed a memory
>> >leak in the failure path (submitted via Matt Day in 1997).  It
>> >is much more robust; I've been troubled by the mount option
>> >cruft in BSD, and the more string stuff goes into the kernel,
>> >the less happy I become with it.
>> 
>> I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing :-)
>> 
>> The main trouble is bad syscall API design:  All strings should be
>> passed by pointer+length, rather than asciiz sematics.
>
>DEFINITELY.
>
>This would let you do the allocation based on peeking at the
>size prior to copying the whole string in.  Count prefix strings
>are one thing the C language has been missing for years.

...unfortunately, just like many other good things, we can't
easily change the API of things like open(2)...

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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