[PATCH] sockaddr.3type: Document that sockaddr_storage is the API to be used

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Eric,

On 4/6/23 18:24, Eric Blake wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 02:42:04AM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> I'm going to reply both your emails here so that GCC is CCed, and they can
>> suggest better stuff.  I'm worried about sending something to POSIX without
>> enough eyes checking it.  So this will be a long email.
> 
> Because your mail landed in a publicly archived mailing list, the
> POSIX folks saw it anyways ;)

:)

> 
> ...
>>>
>>> Whether gcc already has all the attributes you need is not my area of
>>> expertise.  In my skim of the glibc list conversation, I saw mention
>>> of attribute [[gnu:transparent_union]] rather than [[__may_alias__]] -
>>> if that's a better implementation-defined extension that does what we
>>> need, then use it.  The standard developers were a bit uncomfortable
>>> directly putting [[gnu:transparent_union]] in the standard, but
>>> [[__may_alias__]] was noncontroversial (it's in the namespace reserved
>>> for the implementation)
>>
>> Not really; implementation-defined attributes are required to use an
>> implementation-defined prefix like 'gnu::'.  So [[__may_alias__]] is
>> reserved by ISO C, AFAIR.  Maybe it would be better to just mention
>> attributes without any specific attribute name; being fuzzy about it
>> would help avoid making promises that we can't hold.
> 
> On this point, the group agreed, and we intentionally loosened to
> wording to just mention an implementation-defined extension, rather
> than giving any specific attribute name.
> 
> ...
>>
>> I would just make it more fuzzy about which standard version did what.
>> How about this?:
>>
>> [[
>> Note that defining the sockaddr_storage and sockaddr structures using
>> only mechanisms defined in editions of the ISO C standard may produce
>> aliasing diagnostics.  Because of the large body of existing code
>> utilizing sockets in a way that could trigger undefined behavior due
>> to strict aliasing rules, this standard mandates that the various socket
>> address structures can alias each other for accessing their first member,
> 
> The sa_family_t member is not necessarily the first member on all
> platforms (it happens to be first in Linux, but as a counter-example,
> https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=unix&sektion=4 shows
> sun_family as the second one-byte field in struct sockaddr_un).  The
> emphasis is on derefencing the family member (whatever offset it is
> at) to learn what cast to use to then safely access the rest of the
> storage.
> 
> As such, here's the updated wording that the Austin Group tried today
> (and we plan on starting a 30-day interpretation feedback window if
> there are still adjustments to be made to the POSIX wording):
> 
> https://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1641#c6255

Thanks!  That wording (both paragraphs) LGTM.

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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