Glibc change exposing bugs

[Development] Posted Nov 10, 2010 18:39 UTC (Wed) by corbet

People experiencing sound corruption or other strange bugs on recent distribution releases may want to have a look at this Fedora bugzilla entry. It seems that the glibc folks changed the implementation of memcpy() to one which, in theory, is more highly optimized for current processors. Unfortunately, that change exposes bugs in code where developers ignored the requirement that the source and destination arrays passed to memcpy() cannot overlap. Various workarounds have been posted, and the thread includes some choice comments from Linus Torvalds, but the problem has been marked "not a bug." So we may see more than the usual number of problems until all the projects with sloppy mempcy() use get fixed. (Thanks to Sitsofe Wheeler).

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