[cfe-dev] Clang++ and _FORTIFY_SOURCE: Supported or not?

[Richard Smith via cfe-dev]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 4:27 PM, John Snow via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi, all:
>
> I'm trying to find an official notice of support (or a contrary notice)
> for Clang++ and -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2.
>
> The QEMU project ran into an issue recently [1] where Clang++
> (3.5.0-9.fc22) failed to compile certain files because it does not have
> definitions for __builtin_va_pack_len (and friends). This kicks up
> errors when using glibc, cstdio and _FORTIFY_SOURCE together.
>

We still do not support __builtin_va_pack_len and friends (and other
semantic requirements of fortify that rely on details of GCC's phase
ordering). We provide other extensions that can be used to implement (most
of) the functionality of -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE, but the maintenance cost to us
of supporting those GCC builtins directly is sufficiently high that we
don't (currently) intend to do so.

When researching the problem, we ran across an llvm bug [2] where
> Richard Smith states: "_FORTIFY_SOURCE + glibc + clang is not supported
> and does not work".
>
> However, in testing Clang++ 3.7.0-1.fc23, I notice that
> -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE does indeed appear to work. Is that a fluke, or do
> modern versions (>3.5.0) of Clang actually support this combination?
>

Current glibc headers use __builtin_va_arg_* only for GCC 4.3 onwards, and
Clang claims to be GCC 4.2. It's still an unsupported combination, and
while it might compile, some of the checks are unlikely to work because
they require a frontend inliner to be useful (for instance, some of them
require __builtin_object_size to look through function call boundaries
before the frontend type information is erased). We have heard reports from
users that the combination of Clang and glibc fortify is not currently
useful for them.

If it works for you and provides value, that's great, but you should be
aware that the support story is likely to be worse than usual for an
open-source project: all of the effort I can see on the Clang side for
fortify-like features is being directed towards creating a more principled
set of language extensions (and using them to implement fortify-like
features in various flavours of libc) rather than directly supporting the
existing GCC set. Some of these are a close or exact match to the GCC
extension (such as our support for __builtin_object_size and
__builtin_constant_p), and some are not (such as our enable_if attribute
and upcoming pass_object_size attribute).

I can't find official documentation pointing towards either support or
> exclusion of this feature, so a firm answer pointing to either direction
> would be helpful.
>
> Thank you,
> --John Snow
>
> [1] QEMU discussion:
> https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-10/msg06997.html
> [2] https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=23277#c2
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