aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/stdlib/setenv.h
AgeCommit message (Collapse)AuthorFilesLines
2025-01-24stdlib: Re-implement free (environ) compatibility kludge for setenvFlorian Weimer1-3/+12
For the originally failing application (userhelper from usermode), it is not actually necessary to call realloc on the environ pointer. Yes, there will be a memory leak because the application assigns a heap-allocated pointer to environ that it never frees, but this leak was always there: the old realloc-based setenv had a hidden internal variable, last_environ, that was used in a similar way to __environ_array_list. The application is not impacted by the leak anyway because the relevant operations do not happen in a loop. The change here just uses a separte heap allocation and points environ to that. This means that if an application calls free (environ) and restores the environ pointer to the value at process start, and does not modify the environment further, nothing bad happens. This change should not invalidate any previous testing that went into the original getenv thread safety change, commit 7a61e7f557a97ab597d6 ("stdlib: Make getenv thread-safe in more cases"). The new test cases are modeled in part on the env -i use case from bug 32588 (with !DO_MALLOC && !DO_EARLY_SETENV), and the previous stdlib/tst-setenv-malloc test. The DO_MALLOC && !DO_EARLY_SETENV case in the new test should approximate what userhelper from the usermode package does. Reviewed-by: Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>
2025-01-01Update copyright dates with scripts/update-copyrightsPaul Eggert1-1/+1
2024-11-21stdlib: Make getenv thread-safe in more casesFlorian Weimer1-0/+73
Async-signal-safety is preserved, too. In fact, getenv is fully reentrant and can be called from the malloc call in setenv (if a replacement malloc uses getenv during its initialization). This is relatively easy to implement because even before this change, setenv, unsetenv, clearenv, putenv do not deallocate the environment strings themselves as they are removed from the environment. The main changes are: * Use release stores for environment array updates, following the usual pattern for safely publishing immutable data (in this case, the environment strings). * Do not deallocate the environment array. Instead, keep older versions around and adopt an exponential resizing policy. This results in an amortized constant space leak per active environment variable, but there already is such a leak for the variable itself (and that is even length-dependent, and includes no-longer used values). * Add a seqlock-like mechanism to retry getenv if a concurrent unsetenv is observed. Without that, it is possible that getenv returns NULL for a variable that is never unset. This is visible on some AArch64 implementations with the newly added stdlib/tst-getenv-unsetenv test case. The mechanism is not a pure seqlock because it tolerates one write from unsetenv. This avoids the need for a second copy of the environ array that getenv can read from a signal handler that happens to interrupt an unsetenv call. No manual updates are included with this patch because environ usage with execve, posix_spawn, system is still not thread-safe relative unsetenv. The new process may end up with an environment that misses entries that were never unset. This is the same issue described above for getenv. Reviewed-by: Adhemerval Zanella <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>