Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] gitlab-ci.yml: Add jobs to test CFI

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 08:18:03AM -0500, Daniele Buono wrote:
> On 3/2/2021 5:30 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 03:39:42PM -0500, Daniele Buono wrote:
> > > Hi Daniel,
> > > 
> > > On 3/1/2021 10:08 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > > What are the unique failure scenarios for CFI that these jobs are
> > > > likely to expose ? Is it likely that we'll have cases where
> > > > CFI succeeds in say, x86_64 target, but fails in aarch64 target ?
> > > For CFI to fail (even if it shouldn't) you'll need code that is calling a
> > > function pointer that was not well defined at compile time. Although
> > > unlikely, that could happen everywhere in the code.
> > What does "was not well defined" mean here ?
> > 
> 
> At high level, the compiler creates metadata for every function. Before
> jumping to a function pointer, it makes sure that the pointer and the
> pointee have matching types.
> Not well defined means one of these two cases:
> 1. The function has a different type than the pointer -> Most likely an
> error

How strictly is this checked ?  With GLib function prototype mismatch
is not uncommon. For example GLib might need to invoke a callback with
a signature:

   int foo(int somearg, void *opaque);

The API though will often declare the callback signature to be
generic

   void (*GCallback) (void);

The caller will implement a callback with

   int foo(int somearg, mytype *mydata);

and will use  G_CALLBACK() to do an intentional bad cast to GCallback

Before it invokes the callback, GLib would cast from GCallback back
to    int foo(int somearg, void *opaque);

Notice this last arg doesn't match the type of the actual implemented
callback.

Is this scenario going to upset  CFI, or is it happy that 'void *'
is compatible with 'mytype *', and ok with the intermediate casts
to/from GCallback ?

> 2. The function was not available at compile time so the compiler could
> not create the related metadata -> Most likely a false positive.

Regards,
Daniel
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