Mostly harmless: An account of pseudo-normal floating point numbers
Floating point arithmetic is a popularly esoteric subject in computer science. It is safe to say that every software engineer has heard of floating point Read More
Category: glibc
Solving the mystery of hanging character set conversions in glibc’s iconv utility
Website visitors don’t typically consider character encoding and conversion when accessing digital content. However, engineers have been dealing with conversion issues since users started transferring Read More
Broadening compiler checks for buffer overflows in _FORTIFY_SOURCE
Buffer overruns are by far the most common vulnerability in C or C++ programs, and a number of techniques have come up over the years Read More
Building Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 for the x86-64-v2 microarchitecture level
One of the most important early decisions when building a Linux distribution is the scope of supported hardware. The distribution’s default compiler flags are significant Read More
2020 Time Zone Database (tzdata) changes
Daylight saving time transitions, a zone name change, and the removal of some obsolete files: These are some of the changes that occurred in the Read More
Toward _FORTIFY_SOURCE parity between Clang and GCC
GCC combined with glibc can detect instances of buffer overflow by standard C library functions. When a user passes the -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE={1,2} preprocessor flag and an Read More
How the GNU C Library handles backward compatibility
One of the GNU C Library’s (glibc’s) unwritten rules is that a program built against an old version of glibc will continue to work against Read More