Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]

Daniel Phillips (phillips@bonn-fries.net)
Sun, 4 Nov 2001 20:18:11 +0100


On November 4, 2001 07:52 pm, Jakob Østergaard wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 01:30:38PM -0500, Alexander Viro wrote:
> > Folks, could we please deep-six the "ASCII is tough" mentality? Idea of
> > native-endian data is so broken that it's not even funny. Exercise:
> > try to export such thing over the network. Another one: try to use
> > that in a shell script. One more: try to do it portably in Perl script.
>
> So make it network byte order.
>
> How many bugs have you heard of with bad use of sscanf() ?

Yes, and it's easy for those to be buffer overflow bugs. The extra security
risk is even more of a reason to avoid ASCII strings in internal interfaces
than the gross overhead. Do the ASCII conversions in user space, please.

No, ASCII isn't tough, it just sucks as an internal transport.

--
Daniel
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/