From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Nov 10 12:29:00 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id MAA09481 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 12:29:00 -0800 Received: from terra.Sarnoff.COM (terra.sarnoff.com [130.33.11.203]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id MAA09476 for ; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 12:28:54 -0800 Received: from section05 (morse.sarnoff.com [130.33.10.158]) by terra.Sarnoff.COM (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id PAA25604; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 15:27:15 -0500 Received: by section05 (5.x/SECTION05-Client) id AA14814; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 15:26:45 -0500 Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 15:26:44 -0500 (EST) From: "Ron G. Minnich" To: Terry Lambert Cc: lm@slovax.engr.sgi.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org, waa@aurora.cis.upenn.edu, deraadt@theos.com, chuck@maria.wustl.edu Subject: Re: larry: you might want to add this to lmbench (but i'm not sure) In-Reply-To: <199511102004.NAA04257@phaeton.artisoft.com> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I'd actually hope that programs that got this kind of error would be > murdered by the OS. Code that didn't check its return values in > the face of such an error shouldn't be allowed to continue running. We tried this program on windows/nt and it got killed. But for an interesting reason: the posix subsystem on nt is a library, not the kernel server that the books lead you to believe it is. So the posix library does a load from the bogus pointer and dies. But here's the $9K question: how do you decide it's not checking return values, and what return values should you require be checked and which shouldn't? i'm not convinced that's a decision the os should make. ron