Re: [PATCH] libfdt: Correct signed/unsigned comparisons

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On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 10:54:32AM +0100, André Przywara wrote:
> On 21/09/2020 07:00, David Gibson wrote:
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> > On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 11:26:44AM +0100, André Przywara wrote:
> >> On 17/01/2020 09:23, David Gibson wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >>> On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 08:58:12PM +1300, Simon Glass wrote:
> >>>> Hi David,
> >>>>
> >>>> On Thu, 16 Jan 2020 at 19:50, David Gibson <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 11:52:08AM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> >>>>>> These warnings appear when building U-Boot on x86 and some other targets.
> >>>>>> Correct them by adding casts.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Example:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> scripts/dtc/libfdt/fdt.c: In function ‘fdt_offset_ptr’:
> >>>>>> scripts/dtc/libfdt/fdt.c:137:18: warning: comparison of integer expressions of different signedness: ‘unsigned int’ and ‘int’ [-Wsign-compare]
> >>>>>>    if ((absoffset < offset)
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Hmm.  So squashing warnings is certainly a good thing in general.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Unfortunately, I'm really uncomfortable with most of these changes.
> >>>>> In a number of cases they are outright wrong.  In most of the others,
> >>>>> the code was already correct.  I dislike adding casts to suppress
> >>>>> spurious warnings on correct code because that can end up hiding real
> >>>>> problems which might be introduced by future changes.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Case by case details below.
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks for the review. I agree this is all really horrible,
> >>>> particularly in light of the fact that it doesn't fix bugs and perhaps
> >>>> introduces some.
> >>>>
> >>>> This was just a quick patch to silence the warnings. If we do make
> >>>> fixes here we should really make sure that there are test cases to
> >>>> trigger each check. I suspect we have some but not all.
> >>>
> >>> Yeah, adding some safety test cases for egregiously bad input like
> >>> negative buffer sizes is probably a good idea.
> >>>
> >>>> What do you think we should do? The warnings are going to be very
> >>>> annoying for people. I could perhaps split the patch up and work
> >>>> through things one by one.
> >>>
> >>> Yeah, we want to find some way to remove the warnings, and I think
> >>> splitting up and working piece by piece will be necessary.
> >>
> >> Has anyone done anything on that front?
> >> If not, I would take a deep breath and try to tackle this one by one. I
> >> was grudgingly ignoring this in U-Boot so far, but it popped up in
> >> Trusted Firmware now as well, so I have a business reason (TM).
> > 
> >>> I think the very first step, is to find definitive info on what
> >>> exactly the defined behaviour of C is with a signed vs. unsigned
> >>> comparison.
> >>>
> >>> The help text of -Wsign-compare seems to imply that assuming:
> >>>
> >>> 	signed int a;
> >>> 	unsigned int b;
> >>>
> >>> then 
> >>> 	if (a < b) ...
> >>>
> >>> is equivalent to
> >>> 	if ((unsigned int)a < b) ...
> >>>
> >>> But I thought that this was not the case.  Rather, I thought it was
> >>> supposed to always evaluate to true if b > INT_MAX.  We need to know
> >>> which is the case as a starting point.
> > 
> > I since had a brief look at this, and it appears I was wrong about
> > this behaviour, which makes this whole project rather more urgent.
> > I'd still appreciate someone looking at the standards to double check,
> > though.
> > 
> > I'm unlikely to have time to look at this myself, though, so I'd be
> > very happy if you took this on, and I'll do my absolute best to review
> > and merge promptly.
> > 
> > Fwiw, the more "bite-size" the patches are, the easier it is for me to
> > review.  So I'd suggest fixing just a small set of related cases at a
> > time, with a clear justification for why the new semantics are correct
> > in the commit message.
> 
> Yes, breaking this down (as suggested earlier) was the plan. Either by
> group of functions or by type of fix used, not decided yet. And I will
> try to add as much rationale to the commit messages as possible.

👍

> - I guess I can't change the external interface, to amend the signedness
> in function parameters?

On the external interface? No, I don't think that's worth the damage.

On internal functions, absolutely feel free to update the interface if
that's the cleanest approach.

> - Can we assume (or stipulate?) that a DTB is always smaller than 2GB?

Yes.  In fact, fdt_check_header() already verifies that.

> The DT spec doesn't explicitly mention a limit, but the header uses
> uint32_t for size fields. libfdt seems to assume the the actual
> structure block is smaller than 2GB already (by using ints for node
> offsets). So that leaves the corner case of totalsize being potentially
> larger than 2GB only. Do we care about this?

No, as above we already check that that totalsize < 2^31.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson

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