Re: [PATCH] kbuild: treat char as always signed

Jason A. Donenfeld
2022-10-26T00:04:50Z

On Tue, Oct 25, 2022 at 04:00:30PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2022 at 10:23:56PM +0200, Gabriel Paubert wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 22, 2022 at 11:16:33AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > > Practically speaking this might be a bit painful, because we've got
> > > several different variations of this all due to all the things like
> > > our debugging versions (see <linux/fortify-string.h> for example), so
> > > some of our code is this crazy jungle of "with this config, use this
> > > wrapper".
> >
> > I've just had a look at that code, and I don't want to touch it with a
> > 10 foot pole. If someone else to get his hands dirty...
>
> Heh. Yes, fortify-string.h is a twisty maze. I've tried to keep it as
> regular as possible, but I admit it is weird. On my list is to split
> compile-time from run-time logic (as suggested by Linus a while back),
> but I've worried it would end up spilling some of the ugly back into
> string.h, which should probably not happen. As such, I've tried to keep
> it all contained in fortify-string.h.
>
> Regardless, I think I'd rather avoid yet more special cases in the
> fortify code, so I'd like to avoid using transparent union if we can. It
> seems like -funsigned-char and associated fixes will be sufficient,
> though, yes?

I thought some of the motivation behind the transparent union was that
gcc still treats `char` as a distinct type from `unsigned char`, so
gcc's checker can still get upset and warn when passing a u8[] to a
string handling function that expects a char[]. (Once the
-funsigned-char changes go in, though, we should probably decide that
s8[] is never a valid string.)

Jason