Re: What is ``access (NULL, whatever)'' supposed to do?

[Neal H. Walfield]

At Mon,  9 Apr 2007 20:02:32 -0700 (PDT),
Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> wrote:
> 
> It is supposed to crash.  Hopefully it does not hold locks while doing so,
> and we should make sure that it doesn't.  But anything that returns EFAULT
> on Linux has every right to crash with SIGSEGV or SIGBUS there too, and on
> the Hurd we explicitly intend that bad addresses cause crashes and not
> errors that might be ignored.  If it's undefined behavior, crashing quickly
> is the most humane way to treat the disadvantaged programmer who made an
> error or truly didn't know better before.  

This is a nice approach in theory but in practice it fails for us
because the programmers who make these mistakes do not see the
crashes: few programmers develop natively on the Hurd or even test
their code on the Hurd.  As such, ignoring that this behavior has
become de facto only creates work for Hurd porters.  Let these people
make more substantial contributions than correcting technical but
otherwise benign, pedantic bugs.