gentoo VS src

Whilst Firefox may support hardware video decoding, Mesa since March 2022 disables patent encumbered codecs by default[1], and distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuse do not explicitly enable these patent encumbered codecs to avoid possible legal problems. Even Gentoo (built from source code by the user) requires the user to explicitly enable a USE flag (proprietary-codes) to use patent encumbered codecs.[2]

The thought process is that AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and the likes are not providing a patent license with their hardware.[3] They are instead just supplying part of an overall system that together with operating system kernel, display manager software, video player software, etc allows the decoding and encoding of patent encumbered video files. Open source software projects and distributions are concerned they'd be found to be infringing patents by enabling a complete solution out-of-the-box. Hence they put some hurdles in place so that a user has to go out of their way to separately piece together the various parts to form a complete system capable of encoding and decoding patent encumbered codecs.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15...

[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/1265a159743d7f07185a...

[3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...

Thank you! I don't live in git and this helps! Normally under gentoo I shouldn't have to. This actual git https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo (as opposed to the gentoo browser view) plus this "checkout the commit" should get me much further. ... And probably deserve some space in the gentoo docs.

You choose - here's a list

(pending) gentoo/gentoo #30595 sys-cluster/kubescape: new package, add 2.2.6

profiles/targets/desktop/make.defaults:

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...