Author: Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
When upstream developers are unaware of the problems their software has on platforms they can’t test (perhaps because they use another distribution, another environment, another operating system, or another hardware platform) they can’t fix them and are likely to introduce more problems in further versions, if they assume that things are good as they are. Letting upstream developers know of the problems, filing bugs, and in general reporting problems is one of the best ways to help an open source project, and it’s something even users with no technical skills can do.
When you have the technical ability to fix a bug, though, you should try to provide to the upstream developers a patch. However, not all patches can be applied unconditionally upstream, and that makes it harder to fix a problem in the short term. Some of the errors people make while preparing a patch and sending it upstream can be fixed in a reasonably simple way, but I still see bad patches in many packaging systems (including Gentoo on occasion).
The first thing to take into account when writing a patch is that the environment in which you’re working can be different from other environments. By “environment” I mean all the factors that can affect the behaviour of a program, such as the operating system and its version; the distribution, if an operating system has more than one; the drivers used when there is more than one kind; the version of the libraries or of the tools; and so on. One of the most common assumptions developers make while creating patches is that the environment they’re using is the “right” one and everything else should follow it; however, even when the environment used is the “right one,” a patch should always be general enough to be applicable also to “broken” environments.
Using GNU’s Autotools is a good way to allow a C/C++ program to adapt itself to multiple environments. Although they have many problems, and are hated by most of their users, Autotools are currently the best way to handle a multi-platform, adaptable building system. They have facilities to check for headers, libraries, functions, and a lot more. Unfortunately Autotools are quite difficult to learn, and I’m not going into details on how to use them or how to write macros in Autotools’ M4 language, but here’s a brief overview.
In an Autotools-based project, you usually write a configure.ac script in M4, which defines the checks needed on the host machine (the machine which where the build is going to be done); this script is then translated into a shell script by autoconf. You also write makefile.am files which are used by automake to create the templates for makefiles that are created by the configure script after the checks. Usually the configure script can define conditionals for makefiles and create a config.h file where you can find some C preprocessor’s macros useful to create conditional code for a C or C++ source file (using #ifdefs).
For instance, you can’t always suppose that a given header is there, even if it’s part of a standard defined for Unix systems. Libraries change, including system libraries, and something you’re writing now can change in the future. Try to make sure that all the system and non-conventional headers you use are present before using them. You can usually do that with an AC_CHECK_HEADERS() call in configure.ac and using the config.h generated on the host machine to check whether they are present. Sometimes you get warnings during configure execution, stating that a given header “can be preprocessed but fails to compile”: while this is a warning at this time, it is going to be an error in the future, so try to fix it as soon as you can. The fix usually involves adding a couple of needed headers in the prerequisite argument. With this check, for example, you can usually avoid the infamous error of malloc.h on FreeBSD systems (however, malloc.h is actually deprecated; you can use stdlib.h in its place without problems).
System headers aren’t portable, so you should always avoid them if you’re not going to use a kernel service you can’t get in other ways. Try instead to get the information or the services you need; it’s usually more portable also between different version of the same operating system. It’s not unlikely that different Linux (kernel) versions have incompatible headers that can make some software fail to work.
Libraries, too, can be a problem. Glibc, used by every Linux distribution (apart from the ones for embedded usage, which normally use uclibc or dietlibc), provides not only the base functions a normal Clibrary should provide (for example, to interact with kernel) but also provides a complete iconv() implementation, basic gettext implementation, and a getopt_long() function used to get long parameters when a program uses getopt to parse the arguments given to it by the user. However, other system libraries, like FreeBSD’s, don’t provide all that; iconv() is provided on FreeBSD systems by GNU libiconv, while gettext is entirely provided by GNU gettext; for getopt_long(), you need another library just on 4.x series of FreeBSD, on DragonFly BSD, and probably on other non-Linux systems. Autotools provide the AC_CHECK_LIB() macro to check for presence of a given function in a library, allowing the packages to check if they must link to libiconv, libdl, libintl, and so on.
Size of basic types, like integer sizes, can vary among hardware platforms, as can pointer size. This problem is getting bigger lately, as x86_64 systems can now be considered the first 64-bit hardware platform for mainstream desktop users. Having to care about 64-bit cleanness can be a bit tricky for software developed assuming the usual x86 platform, but the fixes are usually easy enough to make in a couple of minutes. One of the most important ways to ensure that the variables’ sizes are right is to use the “standardized integers” which can be found on sys/types.h or stdint.h headers. These are renamed integer types, with a name in the form (u)intSIZE_t — so you have int8_t for 8-bit signed integers and uint64_t for 64-bit unsigned integers. Pointers can’t use those fixed-length types, as they depend on the architecture; they usually have the same length as long integers, but if you can, try ptrdiff_t before using long to store them. Other types, such as size_t and off_t, have their dimension fixed in all the platforms, so they are safe to be used as they are. You should never mix fixed-length and “named” types like unsigned int and long, and you should be sure that you’re using the right %-code when passing integers to printf or scanf. You can usually find macros defined that allow you to get the right code with the size, so PRId64 would be the equivalent of %d for 64-bit integers, while PRIu32 would be the equivalent of %u for 32-bit integers.
Assembler code has also been a problem lately. Before the introduction of x86_64 processors every hardware platform had its own assembler code, so there weren’t too many problems porting it. It was just a matter of having a non-assembler version of the code, which was maybe slower but portable. With the new architecture, instead, you can have assembler code shared between x86 and x86_64 systems, and this is especially true for multimedia applications that make use of extended instructions like MMX, SSE, or 3DNow!. Although the syntax of assembler is usually the same, there are a few things to think about, such as the size of the registers and the operations run on them. Using “base” operations on 32-bit registers on an x86_64 processor will fail, so you usually have to select the register to use as operands with conditionals.
The discussion about hardware compatibility is of course longer than this and deserves a book of its own, as there are a lot of other tricky conditions to take care of. Those working on non-x86 architectures already know how to fix eventual problems and are likely to provide patches in cases where the software is broken.
Returning to software compatibility issues: you should take into account the possibility of crosscompiling the software. Letting Autotools-based projects build in crosscompile is usually an easy task, if you have all the dependencies already crosscompiled (and, obviously, you have a working crosscompiler for the target architecture). Unfortunately, some configure scripts are broken by design and fail to work as they should in crosscompile. The most common error is to use the output of the uname command to select the architecture or platform to compile for; this will tell you about the current system, not the target platform. Instead of using that, you can rely on ${host} and ${target} variables, which contains a CHOST-like string defining the host system (the one you’re compiling on) and the target one (the one you’re compiling for). The CHOST-like strings are structured as tuples, either three components (arch-vendor-os) or four (arch-vendor-kernel-libc), although the latter is used only when the operating system has no one “native” libc. The arch part of the string defines the hardware platform used: i386, i686, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, sparc, and so on; the vendor part used to refer to the hardware vendor (for example, ibm for their mainframes) but lately is being used to refer to the software vendor, so you can find there redhat, debian, mandrake, gentoo (note that Gentoo uses it only on uclibc and Gentoo/*BSD systems) and others, but usually it’s just “pc” for x86 and “unknown” for other architectures. The os part is the most tricky one, as it defines the operating system used. Usually it’s “linux-gnu” for GNU/Linux systems, but it can be “linux-uclibc” or just “linux” for other Linux-based systems, or can be “freebsdX.Y” to refer to a given version of FreeBSD (just “freebsd” is not a valid value). Generally, this value is what you use to check which OS-specific code to enable.
I hope that this introductory article will inspire patch authors to ensure that the changes they make are not going to break other systems. By using the right combination of Autotools and conditional compilation to check for the right environment where the patch is needed, developers can allow upstream maintainers to fix their software, saving maintainers from having to reinvent the wheel every time something in the “common” environment changes.
Category:
- C/C++
