[erlang-questions] unix domain sockets with abstract namespace: can't use all 108 bytes

[Raimo Niskanen]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 04:46:17PM +1200, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
:
> 
> My argument goes like this:
>  - Linux is too important to ignore
>  - The Linux extension is a genuinely useful feature
>    done in a rather unpleasant way
>  - If you are using AF_UNIX in the portable way, you should
>    provide the *length* of the address, not the *size* of the
>    struct.  I remember it being that way in 4.2 BSD and have
>    cited material from some of the key BSD people that that was
>    certainly the intent in 4.3BSD.
>  - But if you care about HP-UX, you had better do some experiments.
> 
> Honestly, just doing the right thing is less effort than arguing
> about it.

Precisely.  Well put!  But what is the "right thing"?

The current implementation passes the address given to it as is, but
ensures it is correctly terminated as in appending a '\0' at the end
that is not counted for address_len, and if that does not fit
in the defined size it bails out.

That felt like the "right thing" when I wrote it, but you can not set the
last byte of the address to non-zero.

The new "right thing" could be to add an exception to the above when there
is a '\0' first in the address, since that hopefully will count as a
correct termination on OS:es that do not understand abstract addresses.

The question is if there is any danger in this because we then give a
contradiction to e.g bind() because we have not used SUN_LEN(su) as we were
told to do...?

I believe not, and will try to find the time to do this
after our OTP-20.rc1 pre-release.

-- 

/ Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB