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Root access vulnerability in glibc library impacts many Linux distros (securityaffairs.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 31 points 2 years ago (6 children)

glibc is great, but holy shit the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    For what it's worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.

    There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There's Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Eventually it’ll be easier to create a compatible drop-in replacement than maintain the decades old code, if it isn’t already

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Like what's happening to X. Wayland is replacing it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Wayland is not a drop-in replacement tho. It's like if glibc developers declared it obsolete and presented a "replacement" that has a completely different API and has 1/100 of glibc functionality and a plugin interface. And then all the dozens of Linux distros have to write all the plugins from scratch to add back missing functionality and do it together in perfect cooperation so that they remain compatible with each other.

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