this change is in preparation for upcoming PIC/shared library support.
the intent is to avoid going through the GOT, mainly so that dprintf
is operable immediately, prior to processing of relocations. having
dprintf accessible from the dynamic linker will make writing and
debugging the dynamic linker much easier.
this change is made with some reluctance, but i think it's for the
best. correct programs must handle either behavior, so there is little
advantage to having malloc(0) return NULL. and i managed to actually
make the malloc code slightly smaller with this change.
do not allow allocations that overflow ptrdiff_t; fix some overflow
checks that were not quite right but didn't matter due to address
layout implementation.
this is needed in the long term for ABI compatibility anyway, and in
the immediate, it helps with building broken programs like GNU screen
that try to prototype the functions themselves rather than using the
header.
the existence of a (kernelspace) thread must never have observable
effects after the thread count is decremented. if signals are not
blocked, it could end up handling the signal for rsyscall and
contributing towards the count of threads which have changed ids,
causing a thread to be missed. this could lead to one thread retaining
unwanted privilege level.
this change may also address other subtle race conditions in
application code that uses signals.
the historic mktemp is supposed to blank the template string on
failure, rather than returning 0. just zero the first character so
that mkstemp and mkdtemp can still retry with O(1) space requirement.
note that this presently does not handle consistency of the libc's own
global state during forking. as per POSIX 2008, if the parent process
was threaded, the child process may only call async-signal-safe
functions until one of the exec-family functions is called, so the
current behavior is believed to be conformant even if non-ideal. it
may be improved at some later time.
use current time in nanoseconds and some potentially-random (if aslr
is enabled) pointer values for the initial tempfile name generation,
and step via a cheap linear prng on collisions. limit the number of
retry attempts to prevent denial of service attacks even if an
attacker can guess the filenames.
this allows sys/types.h to provide the pthread types, as required by
POSIX. this design also facilitates forcing ABI-compatible sizes in
the arch-specific alltypes.h, while eliminating the need for
developers changing the internals of the pthread types to poke around
with arch-specific headers they may not be able to test.
this was originally written for an early draft of the library where
non-standard functions would reside in a static library separate from
the shared libc.so, which would implement a pure standard. the idea
was not to depend on an implementation-dependent __syscall_ret
function in the main libc. but it turned out to be better to put
everything in a single library for both static and dynamic linking
uses, and thus the (incomplete) remnants of this feature were just
enlarging the source and binary.
