HEADS DOWN

[Alfred Perlstein]

* Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> [070513 15:12] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> 
> > Let's clear the issue here...  FreeBSD did not have a choice in the
> > matter.
> 
> Actually it did. The SIGABORT codepath was only executed in case the
> process is running under uid=0, in other cases it would just print out
> the warning. I think behaviour such as this is a violation of POLA as
> the behaviour is different depending on which users runs it (and if the
> allocator can clearly handle the situation for nonprivileged users, it
> can also handle it for root, but instead chose to be annoying).

Ah I see.  It's pretty worrysome that this passes for OK in the
community.  Considering the number of heap  overflows I can't see
this as being too much of a bad thing.

> > We can't be "bug for bug tolerant" with Linnex without copying
> > their allocator.  
> 
> No, but we can with the documented parts, and
> malloc-inside-signal-handler support is documented
> (http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/old/texinfo/glibc-manual-0.02/library_toc.html#SEC357).
> 
> 
> Even if it's forbidden by POSIX or other standards, FreeBSD isn't
> popular enough to be one of the systems that don't support it.

I don't know about that, for the longest time Linux's "fsync"
call was async because it was "faster", I'd not like to compete
on those terms.  Worse is not better.


-- 
- Alfred Perlstein