Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD

Re:Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD by rwmj on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @06:28AM (#25999755)

> libc is not intended to be the official entry point in any way or form, and kernel vulnerabilities and workarounds are not meant to be handled by a libc implementation.

Depending on how you define "workarounds", glibc is full of those. For example stat(2) is very much not the same syscall now as it was back in the 1990s. In some cases glibc will do a runtime test to see which syscall variants are supported by the kernel and implement workarounds (I even saw a case where this caused a bug in some programs).

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Re:Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD by arghwhat on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @07:00AM (#25999958)

This is indicative of glibc's bad design more than anything else.

stat(2) is not a single syscall. The changes are exposed as new, isolated syscalls (sys_stat, sys_newstat, sys_stat64), with glibc switching internally between them as it sees fit, surprising developers in the process.

This makes stat a great example of the syscall being easier to work with, more stable and more reliable than the glibc wrapper.

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