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Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 12:00:25 +0100
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: segfault on 32bit cygwin snapshot
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From: Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Reply-To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Cc: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>,
        Mark Geisert <mark@maxrnd.com>
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[Ping Mark Geisert]

On Mar  3 18:56, Takashi Yano via Cygwin wrote:
> Hi Corinna,
> 
> On Tue, 2 Mar 2021 16:48:45 +0100
> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Mar  2 20:03, Takashi Yano via Cygwin wrote:
> > > > The following check code does not work as expected if
> > > > newly build exe file is linked with old dll which calls
> > > > uname() as in this case.
> > > > 
> > > >   if (CYGWIN_VERSION_CHECK_FOR_UNAME_X)
> > > >     return uname_x (in_name);
> > > > 
> > > > Any idea?
> > > 
> > > Ping Corinna?
> > 
> > I have no idea how we could fix that, other than by rebuilding the DLLs
> > which call uname, too.  We can't check the Cygwin build of all DLLs an
> > executable is linked to.
> 
> I have checked all /usr/bin/*.dll in my cygwin installation and found
> following dlls call uname() rather than uname_x().
> [...]
> Do you think rebuilding all of these (or maybe more) dlls is only
> the solution? 

No, we could also drop the above code snippet.

Here's the problem: When we changed some datatypes in the early 2000s,
the old entry points have been conserved for backward compatibility,
while the new function using the new datatypes got a new name, e. g.,
stat vs. _stat64.

Next, libcygwin.a gets changed so that a newly built executable (using
the new datatypes as defined in the standard headers) calling stat is
redirected to _stat64.

All is well for the next 15+ years or so.

Then we discover that the exact same mechanism fails to work for
uname vs. the new uname_x in python.  What happened?

It turned out that python called uname dynamically Rather then just
calling uname, it calls dlopen();dlsym("uname");

This actually fetches the symbol for uname, not the symbol for uname_x.
The good old mechanism used for ages on standard function, fails as soon
as the caller uses dynamic loading of symbols.  Surprise, surprise!
It was just never taken into consideration that standard libc functions
might be called dynamically, given it usually doesn't make sense.

Given that this affects *all* of these redirected functions, we're in a
bit of a fix.  Fortunately, for all other functions this only affects 32
bit Cygwin, because the 64 bit version never had this backward
compatibility problem.

Therefore, uname vs. uname_x is the only function affecting 64 bit
Cygwin as well, and that's why I added the above crude redirection only
to uname in the first place.

So what we can do is this:

- Either all old DLLs calling uname must be rebuilt.

- Or we remove the above code snippet again and behave like for all
  other redirected functions on 32 bit as well.  Python's os.uname is
  broken, but all the affected DLL sstart working again.

Is there a way around that?  I'm not quite sure, so let's brain storm
a bit, ok?

- One thing we could try is to remove the above code, but add a python
  hack to dlsym instead.  This would let the "old" DLLs work again as
  before and for python we could add a hack to dlsym, along these lines:

    if (CYGWIN_VERSION_CHECK_FOR_UNAME_X
    	&& modulehandle == cygwin1.dll
	&& strcmp (symname, "uname"))
      symname = "uname_x";

Thoughts?  Other ideas?


Thanks,
Corinna
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