On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 07:38:16AM -0400, John Ferlan wrote:
The virObject logic "assumes" that whatever is passed to its API's would be some sort of virObjectPtr; however, if it is not then some really bad things can happen.
So far there's been only virObject{Ref|Unref}, virObject{Lock|Unlock}, and virObjectIsClass and the virObject and virObjectLockable class consumers have been well behaved and code well tested. Soon there will be more consumers and one such consumer tripped over this during testing by passing a virHashTablePtr to virObjectIsClass which ends up calling virClassIsDerivedFrom using "obj->klass", which wasn't really a klass object causing one of those bad things to happen.
To avoid the future possibility that a non virObject class memory was passed to some virObject* API, let's add a "magic_marker" to the base virObject class that contains a value "0xFEEDBEEF", then any place in the code which would accept or process the base opaque virObjectPtr, compare the magic_marker against 0xFEEDBEEF to make sure this is an object allocated by this code.
It is still left up to the caller to handle the failed API calls just as it would be if it passed a NULL opaque pointer anyobj.
I don't think that we need to guard this kind of programming error. We've been able to cope with the current virObject code without hitting this issue. Pavel