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
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
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.
Originally the idea was that using LZMA_FULL_FLUSH
with Stream encoder would read the filter chain
from the same array that was used to intialize the
Stream encoder. Since most apps wouldn't use
LZMA_FULL_FLUSH, most apps wouldn't need to keep
the filter chain available after initializing the
Stream encoder. However, due to my mistake, it
actually required keeping the array always available.
Since setting the new filter chain via the array
used at initialization time is not a nice way to do
it for a couple of reasons, this commit ditches it
and introduces lzma_filters_update(). This new function
replaces also the "persistent" flag used by LZMA2
(and to-be-designed Subblock filter), which was also
an ugly thing to do.
Thanks to Alexey Tourbin for reminding me about the problem
that Stream encoder used to require keeping the filter
chain allocated.
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.
Lasse Collin