Re: 'struct dynamic': struct tag leak in UAPI headers

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1219 bytes --]

On 2023-08-29 16:17, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> Ooh, story time!  Long, long ago, we did not separate "Linux headers"
> from "libc headers".  It used to be somebody's job to take the files
> in /usr/src/linux/include/linux and copy them to /usr/include/linux.
> Bold people used a symlink.  People who cared about things like "Well,
> POSIX says that" would edit the files after copying them to remove things
> that POSIX said shouldn't be there or put _GNU_SOURCE markers around them.
> 
> At some point, we decided to split the headers to create the uapi headers
> to make this job easier.  Refinements are, of course, possible, and now
> easier than ever, but I think it's fair to say that anybody who included
> <linux/elf.h> at any time in history got given a struct dynamic.

Thanks for the story!  :-)


> Well, it's a compile-time failure either way.  Code that depended on it
> is compiling happily today, and the code that would want to use it
> doesn't exist yet, so I'd rather err on the side of keeping code written
> in the last 30 years working.

Fair enough.

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5


[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]