oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/humility

May want to force integer overflow detection on in release builds.

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Dominant language
Rust
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Forks
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Avg merge
3h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Humility does a lot of arithmetic. Much of it involves integers that come from input -- either the target system or a core file. There is a lot of potential for overflow if the ELF or DWARF information isn't what we expect, or is straight-up corrupt.

We've got three options in that case.

  1. Do something nonsensical.
  2. Crash.
  3. Complain and have a hard time with that part of the input but still do useful things with the rest.

We are currently doing (1) in release builds, which is most of our user base since folks are cargo install-ing. If we turn on overflow checking, we get behavior (2), which is pretty lame but at least points us to the problem. I think (3) is a good goal.

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Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating arithmetic that consumes ELF or DWARF input and determine how release-build overflow should be handled; done requires a defined approach that avoids nonsensical results while preserving useful processing.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devtools
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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