[PATCH][BZ #12847] dprintf/vdprintf can cause fork to fail (child process crash)

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, Roland McGrath wrote:

> > If so, since dprintf is not required to be AS-safe,
> > should it just be filed like a wishlist item?
> 
> Sure.  Though, as the sole inventor of dprintf many years before it was
> standardized, I can say authoritatively that it was always the intent that
> it not have any more entanglements (i.e. potential failure modes) than
> stack use and calling write.  (That was never exactly true in the face of
> user-defined printf extensions, but close enough.)

There are plenty of cases where the underlying printf code uses malloc if 
it needs an allocation too large for alloca (and the cut-off, or how such 
allocations relate to the arguments passed to dprintf, is not as far as I 
know considered a public interface to glibc).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com