Moving the Linux Kernel to Modern C

Re:Moving the Linux Kernel to Modern C by rurban on Thursday February 24, 2022 @08:57PM (#30462858)

In this case practical attacks are very likely, due to insecurities added with C11 and the stoneage review model of Linux development.

C11 added insecure Unicode identifiers, and you won't find them in reviewing them manually via email. You need a special linter to detect such Unicode attacks. Or a proper development environment.

Compiler development usually evolves into more bugs, not less. Just now they caught up with the hundreds of bugs they added with gcc-9. Not talking about const, restrict, and strict aliasing, and the still not existing -Oboring for the kernel. Would you dare to use -O3 and -flto and -fstrict-aliasing in the kernel?

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Re:Moving the Linux Kernel to Modern C by marcan_42 on Friday February 25, 2022 @12:18AM (#30463959)

Linux has a checkpatch.pl. If it doesn't already test for Unicode identifiers, it would be trivial to add that. This is a non-issue. You don't ban a new version of a language just because it allows some undesirable things; it's trivial to ban those things specifically, either with scripting or specific compiler option overrides.

Heck, Linux already uses GCC plug-ins to implement some fancier security stuff; it is silly to think they can't handle forbidding Unicode identifiers.

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