src VS fish-shell

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...

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512