Reliability of newlib

[Joel Sherrill]

Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 04:22:09PM +0200, Petkovic - Ilic, M. wrote:
>   
>> I have to determine the reliability of newlib based on the experience of
>> its users. 
>> So has anyone found bugs or other problems in newlib and if so how
>> severe were they. 
>>  
>> I would be very grateful if you would provide me with such an
>> information. 
>>     
>
> we have been shipping a product with newlib 1.12.0 for almost four
> years, and have run into the following:
>
> 1) a version of snprintf previous to 1.12.0 printed size count
>    characters instead of size-1, leading to shortened/missing strings
>    when this was fixed.
>
> 2) there is still a memory leak somewhere in _vfprintf_r and points down 
>    dealing with floating point string rendering where _Balloc is being
>    called, but is not properly being freed when libc is shut down via
>    _reclaim_reent.  the easy workaround has been to avoid doing floating
>    point printfs in transient threads.
>
>   
This may be related to an open RTEMS PR where the RTEMS
thread delete newlib extension has to do somethings on its
own because there wasn't an obvious cleanup routine to call
in newlib that seemed to fit the bill.

This may be ignorance on our part or it may not have existed
at the time the port was done.  It is also possible that there
is a conflict of mutexes since the delete thread extension is
run from inside RTEMS and you may have to start flushing
IO on another thread.  I honestly don't remember all the possibilities
and rationale.

Jeff .. what is the recommended cleanup routine to call on
the reent structure when a thread is deleted?


--joel
> neither of these were showstoppers for my application.
>
>