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authorEric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>2011-06-29 15:46:50 -0600
committerEric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>2011-06-29 16:04:56 -0600
commit3dbe75e4eb0623e54141a53aac7bb71d602e4332 (patch)
tree348381d47855af4158a39a60c5009ba387709ec9 /doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi
parent0f247f994ecf88c40563c2d264536a1aa7634b33 (diff)
downloadgnulib-3dbe75e4eb0623e54141a53aac7bb71d602e4332.tar.gz
pipe, pipe2: don't corrupt fd on error
I noticed a potential subtle double-close bug in libvirt. There, a common idiom is to initialize an int fd[2]={-1,-1}, then have multiple error paths goto common cleanup code. In the cleanup code, the fds are closed if they are not already -1; this works if the error label is reached before the pipe call, or after pipe succeeds, but if it was the pipe call itself that jumped to the error label, then it is relying on failed pipe() not altering the values already in fd array prior to the failure. Our pipe2 replacement violated this assumption, and could leave a non-negative value in the array, which in turn would let libvirt close an already-closed fd, possibly nuking an unrelated fd opened by another thread that happened to get the same value. As a result, I raised a POSIX issue regarding the behavior of pipe on failure: http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=467 Using that test program, I learned that most systems leave fd unchanged on error, but that mingw always assigns -1 into the array. This fixes the mingw pipe() replacement, as well as the gnulib pipe2() replacement. I don't know of any race-free way to work around a cygwin crash: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-06/msg00328.html - we could always open() and then close() two fds to guess whether two spare fd still remain before calling pipe(), but that is racy. * lib/pipe.c (pipe): Leave fd unchanged on error. * lib/pipe2.c (pipe2): Likewise. * doc/posix-functions/pipe.texi (pipe): Document cygwin issue. * doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi (pipe2): Likewise. Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi')
-rw-r--r--doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi4
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi b/doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi
index 5721ae9b98..4bc1cb6eb6 100644
--- a/doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi
+++ b/doc/glibc-functions/pipe2.texi
@@ -14,6 +14,10 @@ IRIX 6.5, OSF/1 5.1, Solaris 11 2010-11, Cygwin 1.7.1, mingw, Interix 3.5, BeOS.
Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:
@itemize
+@item
+This function crashes rather than failing with @code{EMFILE} if no
+resources are left on some platforms:
+Cygwin 1.7.9.
@end itemize
Note: This function portably supports the @code{O_NONBLOCK} flag only if the