In the C99 and C17 standards, section 6.5.6 paragraph 8 means that
adding 0 to a null pointer is undefined behavior. As of writing,
"clang -fsanitize=undefined" (Clang 15) diagnoses this. However,
I'm not aware of any compiler that would take advantage of this
when optimizing (Clang 15 included). It's good to avoid this anyway
since compilers might some day infer that pointer arithmetic implies
that the pointer is not NULL. That is, the following foo() would then
unconditionally return 0, even for foo(NULL, 0):
void bar(char *a, char *b);
int foo(char *a, size_t n)
{
bar(a, a + n);
return a == NULL;
}
In contrast to C, C++ explicitly allows null pointer + 0. So if
the above is compiled as C++ then there is no undefined behavior
in the foo(NULL, 0) call.
To me it seems that changing the C standard would be the sane
thing to do (just add one sentence) as it would ensure that a huge
amount of old code won't break in the future. Based on web searches
it seems that a large number of codebases (where null pointer + 0
occurs) are being fixed instead to be future-proof in case compilers
will some day optimize based on it (like making the above foo(NULL, 0)
return 0) which in the worst case will cause security bugs.
Some projects don't plan to change it. For example, gnulib and thus
many GNU tools currently require that null pointer + 0 is defined:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2021-11/msg00000.htmlhttps://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Other-portability-assumptions.html
In XZ Utils null pointer + 0 issue should be fixed after this
commit. This adds a few if-statements and thus branches to avoid
null pointer + 0. These check for size > 0 instead of ptr != NULL
because this way bugs where size > 0 && ptr == NULL will likely
get caught quickly. None of them are in hot spots so it shouldn't
matter for performance.
A little less readable version would be replacing
ptr + offset
with
offset != 0 ? ptr + offset : ptr
or creating a macro for it:
#define my_ptr_add(ptr, offset) \
((offset) != 0 ? ((ptr) + (offset)) : (ptr))
Checking for offset != 0 instead of ptr != NULL allows GCC >= 8.1,
Clang >= 7, and Clang-based ICX to optimize it to the very same code
as ptr + offset. That is, it won't create a branch. So for hot code
this could be a good solution to avoid null pointer + 0. Unfortunately
other compilers like ICC 2021 or MSVC 19.33 (VS2022) will create a
branch from my_ptr_add().
Thanks to Marcin Kowalczyk for reporting the problem:
https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/issues/36
Now it limits the input and output buffer sizes that are
passed to a raw decoder. This way there's no need to check
if the sizes can grow too big or overflow when updating
Compressed Size and Uncompressed Size counts. This also means
that a corrupt file cannot cause the raw decoder to process
useless extra input or output that would exceed the size info
in Block Header (and thus cause LZMA_DATA_ERROR anyway).
More importantly, now the size information is verified more
carefully in case raw decoder returns LZMA_OK. This doesn't
really matter with the current single-threaded .xz decoder
as the errors would be detected slightly later anyway. But
this helps avoiding corner cases in the upcoming threaded
decompressor, and it might help other Block decoder uses
outside liblzma too.
The test files bad-1-lzma2-{9,10,11}.xz test these conditions.
With the single-threaded .xz decoder the only difference is
that LZMA_DATA_ERROR is detected in a difference place now.
Only one definition was visible in a translation unit.
It avoided a few casts and temp variables but seems that
this hack doesn't work with link-time optimizations in compilers
as it's not C99/C11 compliant.
Fixes:
http://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00279.html
Note that this slightly changes how lzma_block_header_decode()
has been documented. Earlier it said that the .version is set
to the lowest required value, but now it says that the .version
field is kept unchanged if possible. In practice this doesn't
affect any old code, because before this commit the only
possible .version was 0.
There is a tiny risk of causing breakage: If an application
assigns lzma_stream.allocator to a non-const pointer, such
code won't compile anymore. I don't know why anyone would do
such a thing though, so in practice this shouldn't cause trouble.
Thanks to Jan Kratochvil for the patch.
liblzma tries to avoid useless free()/malloc() pairs in
initialization when multiple files are handled using the
same lzma_stream. This didn't work with filter chains
due to comparison of wrong pointers in lzma_next_coder_init(),
making liblzma think that no memory reallocation is needed
even when it actually is.
Easy way to trigger this bug is to decompress two files with
a single xz command. The first file should have e.g. x86+LZMA2
as the filter chain, and the second file just LZMA2.
- Updated to the latest, probably final file format version.
- Command line tool reworked to not use threads anymore.
Threading will probably go into liblzma anyway.
- Memory usage limit is now about 30 % for uncompression
and about 90 % for compression.
- Progress indicator with --verbose
- Simplified --help and full --long-help
- Upgraded to the last LGPLv2.1+ getopt_long from gnulib.
- Some bug fixes
code from block_private.h to block_decoder.c. Now the Block
encoder doesn't need compressed_size and uncompressed_size
from lzma_block structure to be initialized.
broken. API has changed a lot and it will still change a
little more here and there. The command line tool doesn't
have all the required changes to reflect the API changes, so
it's easy to get "internal error" or trigger assertions.
specification. Simplify things by removing most of the
support for known uncompressed size in most places.
There are some miscellaneous changes here and there too.
The API of liblzma has got many changes and still some
more will be done soon. While most of the code has been
updated, some things are not fixed (the command line tool
will choke with invalid filter chain, if nothing else).
Subblock filter is somewhat broken for now. It will be
updated once the encoded format of the Subblock filter
has been decided.
encoder and decoder, and put the shared things to
block_private.h. Improved the checks a little so that
they may detect too big Compressed Size at initialization
time if lzma_options_block.total_size or .total_limit is
known.
Allow encoding and decoding Blocks with combinations of
fields that are not allowed by the file format specification.
Doing this requires that the application passes such a
combination in lzma_options_lzma; liblzma doesn't do that,
but it's not impossible that someone could find them useful
in some custom file format.
Lasse Collin