POSIX clearly specifies the type of msg_iovlen and msg_controllen, and
Linux ignores it and makes them both size_t instead. to work around
this we add padding (instead of just using the wrong types like glibc
does), but we also need to patch-up the struct before passing it to
the kernel in case the caller did not zero-fill it.
if i could trust the kernel to just ignore the upper 32 bits, this
would not be necessary, but i don't think it will ignore them...
previously NULL was returned in ai_canonname, resulting in crashes in
some callers. this behavior was incorrect. note however that the new
behavior differs from glibc, which performs reverse dns lookups. POSIX
is very clear that a reverse DNS lookup must not be performed for
numeric addresses.
this is something of a tradeoff, as now set*id() functions, rather
than pthread_create, are what pull in the code overhead for dealing
with linux's refusal to implement proper POSIX thread-vs-process
semantics. my motivations are:
1. it's cleaner this way, especially cleaner to optimize out the
rsyscall locking overhead from pthread_create when it's not needed.
2. it's expected that only a tiny number of core system programs will
ever use set*id() functions, whereas many programs may want to use
threads, and making thread overhead tiny is an incentive for "light"
programs to try threads.
since timer_create is no longer allocating a structure for the timer_t
and simply using the kernel timer id, it was impossible to specify the
timer_t as the argument to the signal handler. the solution is to pass
the null sigevent pointer on to the kernel, rather than filling it in
userspace, so that the kernel does the right thing. however, that
precludes the clever timerid-versus-threadid encoding we were doing.
instead, just assume timerids are below 1M and thread pointers are
above 1M. (in perspective: timerids are sequentially allocated and
seem limited to 32k, and thread pointers are at roughly 3G.)
with these small changes, libc functions which need to call functions
which are cancellation points, but which themselves must not be
cancellation points, can use the CANCELPT_INHIBIT and CANCELPT_RESUME
macros to temporarily inhibit all cancellation.
note that unlike the originals, these do not print the program
name/argv[0] because we have not saved it anywhere. this could be
changed in __libc_start_main if desired.
this could actually cause rare crashes in the case where a short
string is located at the end of a page and the following page is not
readable, and in fact this was seen in gcc compiling certain files.
the bug appeared only with requests roughly 2*sizeof(size_t) to
4*sizeof(size_t) bytes smaller than a multiple of the page size, and
only for requests large enough to be serviced by mmap instead of the
normal heap. it was only ever observed on 64-bit machines but
presumably could also affect 32-bit (albeit with a smaller window of
opportunity).