ctl VS src

I recall a few years back doing something like this implementing a binary heap just as a hobby project (https://github.com/Equationist/ctl/blob/master/pqueue.h). I was curious to see how unoptimized it was vis a vis the STL, and ran compiled equivalent test code for both my priority queue and the STL's C++ implementation, with just integers. I was kind of shocked to find that my implementation was like 30% faster when both were compiled at -O3 levels. Seeing this backport I guess there isn't anything fancy in the STL implementations, so it's less surprising that my naive implementation could be just as fast (or happen to be faster).

The OpenBSD project released 7.4 of their OS on 16 Oct 2023 as their 55th release 💫

Well since https://www.openbsd.org/ still says

> Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!

I'm assuming not, but I could always be mistaken.

> building a cat from scratch

> That would be an interesting project.

Here is the source code of the OpenBSD implementation of cat:

> https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c

and here of the GNU coreutils implementation:

> https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

Thus: I don't think building a cat from scratch or creating a tutorial about that topic is particularly hard (even though the HN audience would likely be interested in it). :-)

> I don't know how they define `MAX`, but I'm guessing it's a typical "a>b?a:b"

Indeed: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/param.h#L...

> Then `SYS_kbind` seems to be a signed int.

It's an untyped #define: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/syscall.h...

I believe your whole analysis is correct, that running an elf file with an openbsd.syscalls entry with .sysno > INT_MAX will allow an out-of-bounds write.

I can reproduce it. And this is the commit that causes the issue: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/d21788ce70be80e9c4ed0c52c149e01147c4a823

This doesn’t really change your conclusion, but I think that’s the wrong file. This is the real doas afaict: https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/doas/doas...

Still just a tidy 1072 lines in that folder though.

I spent 5 minutes staring at your file trying to understand how on earth it does the things in the man page, but of course it doesn’t.

OpenBSD developers are making serious effort to kill off indirect syscalls, the base system is completely clean, take a look at the work Andrew Fresh did to adapt Perl. He write a complete syscall "dispatcher" or emulator for the Perl syscall function so that it calls the libc stubs.

https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/312e26c80be876012ae979...

The ports tree is also being cleansed of syscall(2) usage, until they're all gone.

msyscall, pinsyscall, recent mandatory IBT/BTI, xonly. OpenBSD is making waves, but people aren't really seeing them yet.

Actually, I got it wrong, too many vulnerabilities in flight. They did fix it: https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/375ccafb2eb77de6cf240e...