POSIX requires the symlink function to fail with ENAMETOOLONG if the
link contents to be written exceed SYMLINK_MAX in length, but neither
Linux nor our syscall wrapper code enforce this. the value 255 for
SYMLINK_MAX is not meaningful and does not seem to have been motivated
by anything except perhaps a wrong assumption that a definition was
mandatory. it has been present (though moving through bits to
top-level limits.h) since the beginning of the project history.
[f]pathconf is entitled to return -1 as the limit for conf names for
which there is no hard limit, with the usual POSIX note that an
indefinite limit does not imply an infinite limit. in principle we
might should report a limit for filesystems that impose one, but such
functionality is not currently present for any of the pathconf limits,
and adding it is beyond the scope of fixing the incorrect limit.
this error resulted in an out-of-bounds read, as opposed to a reported
error, when calling the function with an argument one greater than the
max valid index.
PAGE_SIZE was hardcoded to 4096, which is historically what most
systems use, but on several archs it is a kernel config parameter,
user space can only know it at execution time from the aux vector.
PAGE_SIZE and PAGESIZE are not defined on archs where page size is
a runtime parameter, applications should use sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE)
to query it. Internally libc code defines PAGE_SIZE to libc.page_size,
which is set to aux[AT_PAGESZ] in __init_libc and early in __dynlink
as well. (Note that libc.page_size can be accessed without GOT, ie.
before relocations are done)
Some fpathconf settings are hardcoded to 4096, these should be actually
queried from the filesystem using statfs.
Rich Felker
Szabolcs Nagy