Re: memory corruption in regex.c

[Chong Yidong]

Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:

> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=435767
>
> emacs invokes undefined behavior in regex.c, computing the difference
> between unrelated pointers.  In general, this wouldn't be too much of
> a problem, as long as the type used to represent the difference was
> wide enough to cover the entire possible range of pointer differences.
>
> Such a type is not even guaranteed to exist, and it can be tricky to
> get reasonable results on segmented architectures.  So, the correct
> code needs to compute offsets between pointers in the old buffer, and
> apply the same offset into the new buffer.  On most cases, the
> compiler will just optimize the code to the same we got before on
> i386, and to something very close, but using a 64-bit offset on
> x86-64.

This sounds correct.  Thanks very much for catching this bug.  I don't
see any problem with your patch, except:

> -    re_char *old_buffer = bufp->buffer;                                      
> \
> +    unsigned char *old_buffer = bufp->buffer;                                
> \

What is the purpose of this?