Re: 5.8: LTO exposes some new issues

[Roman Perepelitsa <roman.perepelitsa@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 1:20 PM Daniel Shahaf <d.s@daniel.shahaf.name> wrote:
>
> Roman Perepelitsa wrote on Tue, 28 Jul 2020 12:52 +0200:
> >
> > How about this? The diff is a bit larger but the code is fairly
> > straightforward. Only hashtable.c has access to internal fields, just
> > like before the patch.
> >
> > In a nutshell, struct hashtable has only public data members. Within
> > hashtable.c there is struct hashtableimpl, which has struct hashtable
> > as the first data member. C allows casting a pointer to a struct to a
> > pointer to its first data member and back without violating aliasing
> > rules. Thus hashtable.c can cast struct hashtable* to struct
> > hashtableimpl* in order to get access to internal fields.
>
> Thanks, that addresses the previous point, but unfortunately it creates
> another problem: people who read the .h file are liable to declare
> local variables of type 'struct hashtable', or memcpy() them around,
> and in either case, once such a variable gets to hashtable.c and the
> private members are accessed, we'll get out-of-bounds reads.

This problem exists in the current version of the code, too. The patch
addresses one problem -- it removes undefined behavior due to ODR
violation. If you want, I can extend the patch so that it also
addresses the second problem you've identified although it might be
betted done in a separate patch given that it's independent from the
first.

Roman.