Re: [committed mig] Do not generate code dereferencing type-punned pointers

[Justus Winter]

Hi David :)

thanks for cleaning up after me ;)  (again and again...)

Quoting David Michael (2015-02-18 05:39:46)
> On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Justus Winter
> <4winter@informatik.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> > * utils.c (WriteFieldDeclPrim): Generate a union with an additional
> > pointer field for variable-length arrays.
> 
> This makes GDB's awk script go haywire because it doesn't know how to
> deal with unions.  The following is a workaround to get it building
> again, but I'm not sure of its correctness.  Can someone more
> knowledgeable than me check on this?

Not that I'm claiming to know why gdb does what it does, but Samuel
asked me to look into this.  Here goes:

For some reason (proxying?), gdb uses mig to create server-side stubs
for the *reply*-half of some protocols.  It then uses an awk-script to
insert the following code into the server-stubs:

if (In0P->Head.msgh_size == sizeof (Reply)
         && ! (In0P->Head.msgh_bits & MACH_MSGH_BITS_COMPLEX)
         && ! BAD_TYPECHECK(&In0P->return_codeType, &return_codeCheck)
         && In0P->return_code != 0)
/* Error return, only the error code argument is passed.  */
{
  kern_return_t (*sfun)(mach_port_t, kern_return_t, int, data_t, 
mach_msg_type_number_t, data_t, mach_msg_type_number_t) = 
S_proc_getprocinfo_reply;
  OutP->RetCode = (*(kern_return_t (*)(mach_port_t, kern_return_t))sfun) 
(In0P->Head.msgh_request_port, In0P->return_code);
  return;
}

This is inserted *before* any type checks.  The awk script has this to
say:

# The first args type checking statement; we need to insert our chunk of
# code that bypasses all the type checks if this is an error return, after
# which we're done until we get to the next function.  Handily, the size
# of mig's Reply structure is also the size of the alternate Request
# structure that we want to check for.
[...]
# Force the function into a type that only takes the first two args, via
# the temp variable SFUN (is there another way to correctly do this cast?).
# This is possibly bogus, but easier than supplying bogus values for all
# the other args (we can't just pass 0 for them, as they might not be scalar).

I don't see why it bothers with SFUN in the first place.  It could just do

  OutP->RetCode = (*(kern_return_t (*)(mach_port_t, kern_return_t)) 
S_proc_getprocinfo_reply) (In0P->Head.msgh_request_port, In0P->return_code);

right?  If so, the main reason for parsing the struct is gone, and we
could simplify the script a lot and thus making it less likely to
break in the future.  Getting rid of it entirely would be nice though.

A word about the patch.  It seems to cheat by assuming `data_t' as the
type as soon at it sees a union.  That shouldn't matter since the type
is only used for the stupid cast.  But the better way would be to just
get rid of the parsing in the first place, or the whole script when
we're at it.

Justus