Re: Is there any word about this bug in gcc ?

From: H. Peter Anvin
Date: Tue Nov 20 2007 - 00:11:01 EST


WANG Cong wrote:
On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 10:13:42AM +0800, zhengyi wrote:
Is there any relevance to the kernel ?

I found the folowing code here:
http://linux.solidot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/0512218&from=rss

-------------------------------------------------------------------
int main( void )
{
int i=2;
if( -10*abs (i-1) == 10*abs(i-1) )
printf ("OMG,-10==10 in linux!\n");
else
printf ("nothing special here\n") ;

return 0 ;
}

I think no. It is considered a bug in abs(), kernel, of course,
doesn't use glibc's abs().


Wrong.

abs() is internal to gcc, and the above is optimized out at compile time, so any user of abs() as a function at all is vulnerable.

However, the Linux kernel defines abs() as a macro:

#define abs(x) ({ \
int __x = (x); \
(__x < 0) ? -__x : __x; \
})

... which means gcc never sees it. So the kernel isn't affected, because it doesn't use *gcc's* abs().

-hpa

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