Re: Fwd: Any user can panic OpenBSD machine

[Todd.Miller () COURTESAN COM (Todd C. Miller)]

In message <199807281751.KAA09455 () lestat nas nasa gov>
        so spake Jason Thorpe (thorpej):

> I'd also like to point out that the OpenBSD "fix" for the problem is
> incorrect.
>
> It is now possible for the OpenBSD read and write system calls to return
> garbage "bytes actually transfered" values.

Not as of this afternoon ;-)  Personally, I think it's pretty stupid
that the return values for read/write are not large enough to encode
their size param.  Actually, XPG does not prohibit the use of nbytes
> SSIZE_MAX, but that will hose people who check for a failed system
call by chaning against "< 0" instead of "== -1".  What the "right"
thing to do here is largely a matter of opinion as I've seen no
standards doc that really specifies this (feel free to correct me).

 - todd