Re: [PATCH] kbuild: treat char as always signed

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 12:11 PM Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yeah, I've had to fight these casts in fortify-string.h from time to
> time. I'd love to see the patch you used -- I bet it would keep future
> problems at bay.

Heh. The fortify-source patch was just literally

  -       unsigned char *__p = (unsigned char *)(p);              \
  +       char *__p = (char *)(p);                                \

in __compiletime_strlen(), just to make the later

        __ret = __builtin_strlen(__p);

happy.

I didn't see any reason that code was using 'unsigned char *', but I
didn't look very closely.

But honestly, while fixing that was just a local thing, a lot of other
cases most definitely weren't.

The crypto code uses 'unsigned char *' a lot - which makes a lot of
sense, since the crypto code really does work basically with a "byte
array", and 'unsigned char *' tends to really be a good way to do
that.

But then a lot of the *users* of the crypto code may have other ideas,
ie they may have strings as the source, where 'char *' is a lot more
natural.

And as mentioned, some of it really is just fairly fundamental
compiler confusion. The fact that you can't use a regular string
literals with 'unsigned char' is just crazy. There's no *advantage* to
that, it's literally just an annoyance.

(And yes, there's u"hello word", but and yes, that's actually
"unsigned char" compatible as of C23, but not because the 'u' is
'unsigned', but because the 'u' stands for 'utf8', and it seems that
the C standard people finally decided that 'unsigned char[]' was the
right type for UTF8. But in C11, it's actually still just 'char *',
and I think that you get that completely broken sign warning unless
you do an explicit cast).

No sane person should think that any of this is reasonable, and C23
actually makes things *WORSE* - not because C23 made the right choice,
but because it just makes the whole signedness even messier.

IOW, signedness is C is such a mess that -Wpointer-sign is actively
detrimental as things are right now. And look above - it's not even
getting better, it's just getting even more confusing and odd.

              Linus