Re: [libvirt] cpu flags
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:43:19AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 04:45:09PM -0400, Ben Guthro wrote:
> My concern is that adding to the nodeinfo struct breaks the API - such
> that the structs will be different sizes between versions.
Extending this structure would break the A _B_ I.
<aside>
Specifically, because of dynamic linking you can have two situations
arising:
(1) caller compiled against old libvirt links to newer libvirt
(2) caller compiled against new libvirt links to older libvirt
You cannot tell just from the pointer passed to virNodeGetInfo how
large the caller's structure is, so you could end up overwriting
memory beyond the structure in case (1).
In calls such as virDomainInterfaceStats, I fixed this by having the
caller pass both a pointer to the structure and the size of the
caller's structure. This allows us to expand the structure in future
in a way which won't break either case (1) or (2). I would encourage
people designing future libvirt APIs which take a pointer to a
How about just having a virVersion field that would tell you what
version of the struct it is? This being on top of the check you have.
That way you can also guard against functions that change the number of
arguments, which would not change the size of the caller's structure.