this patch improves the correctness, simplicity, and size of
cancellation-related code. modulo any small errors, it should now be
completely conformant, safe, and resource-leak free.
the notion of entering and exiting cancellation-point context has been
completely eliminated and replaced with alternative syscall assembly
code for cancellable syscalls. the assembly is responsible for setting
up execution context information (stack pointer and address of the
syscall instruction) which the cancellation signal handler can use to
determine whether the interrupted code was in a cancellable state.
these changes eliminate race conditions in the previous generation of
cancellation handling code (whereby a cancellation request received
just prior to the syscall would not be processed, leaving the syscall
to block, potentially indefinitely), and remedy an issue where
non-cancellable syscalls made from signal handlers became cancellable
if the signal handler interrupted a cancellation point.
x86_64 asm is untested and may need a second try to get it right.
we can do this without violating the namespace now that they are
macros/inline functions rather than extern functions. the motivation
is that gcc was generating giant, slow, horrible code for the old
functions, and now generates a single byte-swapping instruction.
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.
sadly the C language does not specify any such implicit conversion, so
this is not a matter of just fixing warnings (as gcc treats it) but
actual errors. i would like to revisit a number of these changes and
possibly revise the types used to reduce the number of casts required.
Rich Felker