Re: Is detecting endianness at compile-time unworkable?

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



A small step back...


On 7/30/2018 11:39 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
On Sun, Jul 29 2018, Michael wrote:

On 29/07/2018 22:06, brian m. carlson wrote:
On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 09:48:43PM +0200, Michael wrote:
On 29/07/2018 21:27, brian m. carlson wrote:
Well, that explains it.  I would recommend submitting a patch to
https://github.com/cr-marcstevens/sha1collisiondetection, and the we can
pull in the updated submodule with that fix.
Not sure I am smart enough to do that. I'll have to download, build, and see
what it says.
The issue is that somewhere in lib/sha1.c, you need to cause
SHA1DC_BIGENDIAN to be set.  That means you need to figure out what
compiler macro might indicate that.
I remember - roughly - a few decades back - having an assignment to
write code to determine endianness. PDP and VAC were different iirc,
and many other micro-processors besides the 8088/8086/z85/68k/etc..

If you are looking for a compiler macro as a way to determine this -
maybe you have one for gcc, but not for xlc. I do not know it - currently :)
I'm not familiar with AIX, but from searching around I found this
porting manual from IBM:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246034.pdf
This is from July 2001 - when AIX 5L, for Linux affinity, was new. AIX was (nearly) the #1 posix system, and linux was a minor player in the data center (in or out (now as IAAS)). IMHO, the recommendations made in 2001 are probably no longer applicable (64-bit was fairly new, e.g., rather than common).

There they suggest either defining your own macros, or testing the
memory layout at runtime (see section "2.2.2.3 Technique 3: Testing
memory layout" and surrounding sections).

Perhaps it's worth taking a step back here and thinking about whether
this whole thing is unworkable. It was hard enough to get this to work
on the combination of Linux, *BSD and Solaris, but I suspect we'll run
into increasingly obscure platforms where this is hard or impossible
(AIX, HP/UX etc.)

The reason we're in this hole is because we use this
sha1collisiondetection library to do SHA-1, and the reason we have
issues with it specifically (not OpenSSL et al) is because its only
method of detecting endianness is at compile time.
Cannot speak for the "others", but as I have mentioned before - as AIX in only on POWER it is also only Big Endian - so a compiletime #if testing for _AIX will work fine
This didn't use to be the case, it was changed in this commit:
https://github.com/cr-marcstevens/sha1collisiondetection/commit/d597672

Dan Shumow: Since the commit message doesn't say why, can you elaborate
a bit on why this was done, i.e. is determining this at runtime harmful
for performance? If not, perhaps it would be best to bring this back, at
least as an option.

And, as an aside, the reason we can't easily make it better ourselves is
because the build process for git.git doesn't have a facility to run
code to detect this type of stuff (the configure script is always
optional). So we can't just run this test ourselves.
On AIX - I am required to run configure, and frankly, I am amazed that not everyone is running it. Among other things I an modifying the prefix (to /opt) and many of the others to different /var/git/* areas as I do not want to "polute" the BOS (base OS) and/or other packages/packagers. Officially, according the Linux FHS-3.0 I sould be using /opt/aixtools as prefix.

FYI: my current build process is:
wget git-{version}.tar.xz
xz -dc git-{version}.tar.xz
cd git-{version}.tar.xz
mv Makefile Makefile.git #my build scripts only run configure when Makefile does not exist
./configure ...
ln Makefile.git Makefile
make

I am amazed, as it rarely happens (maybe git is my first encounter) - that configure does not create a Makefile. This also complicates building git "out of tree".

Junio: I've barked up that particular tree before in
https://public-inbox.org/git/87a7x3kmh5.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ and I
won't bore you all by repeating myself, except to say that this is yet
another case where I wish we had a hard dependency on some way of doing
checks via compiled code in our build system.
For AIX: again - the determination is simple. If _AIX is set to 1 then use BigEndian, or, use:
michael@x071:[/home/michael]uname
AIX
 i.e., something like:
$(uname) == "AIX" && BigEndian=1



[Index of Archives]     [Linux Kernel Development]     [Gcc Help]     [IETF Annouce]     [DCCP]     [Netdev]     [Networking]     [Security]     [V4L]     [Bugtraq]     [Yosemite]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Linux SCSI]     [Fedora Users]

  Powered by Linux