Re: [PATCH v2] semihosting: add O_BINARY flag in host_open for NT compatibility

[Alex Bennée]

eiakovlev@linux.microsoft.com writes:

> On 1/6/23 7:58 PM, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, 6 Jan 2023 at 18:22, Evgeny Iakovlev
>> <eiakovlev@linux.microsoft.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On 1/6/2023 17:28, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> >> On Fri, 6 Jan 2023 at 15:44, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>> >>> Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:
>> >> I think the theory when the semihosting API was originally designed
>> >> decades ago was basically "when the guest does fopen(...) this
>> >> should act like it does on the host". So as a bit of portable
>> >> guest code you would say whether you wanted a binary or a text
>> >> file, and the effect would be that if you were running on Windows
>> >> and you output a text file then you'd get \r\n like the user
>> >> probably expected, and if on Linux you get \n.
>>  > If SYS_OPEN is supposed to call fopen (i didn't actually know
>> that..)
>> > then it does make more sense for binary/text mode to be propagated from
>> > guest.
>> It's not required to literally call fopen(). It just has to
>> give the specified semantics for when the guest passes it a
>> mode integer, which is defined in terms of the ISO C
>> fopen() string semantics for "r", "rb", "r+", "r+b", etc.
>>  > Qemu's implementation calls open(2) though, which is not correct
>> > at all then. Well, as long as qemu does that, there is no
>> > posix-compliant way to tell open(2) if it should use binary or text
>> > mode, there is no notion of that as far as posix (and most
>> > implementations) is concerned.
>> QEMU doesn't have to be pure POSIX compliant: we know what our
>> supported host platforms are and we can freely use extensions
>> they provide. If we want to achieve the semantics that semihosting
>> asks for then we can do that with open(), by passing O_BINARY when
>> the mode integer from the guest corresponds to a string with "b" in it.
>> I'm about 50:50 on whether we should do that vs documenting and
>> commenting that we deliberately produce the same behaviour on all
>> platforms by ignoring the 'b' flag, though.
>> thanks
>> -- PMM
>> 
>
> Thanks Peter, i think i see your point. However, if you ask me, i feel
> like advertising a feature to guest code and only implementing it on 1
> platform that supports it just because it has a non-standard POSIX
> implementation will only confuse the issue further.
> Guest code doesn't want to care whether or not an emulator is running
> on Linux or Windows, there is no notion of that leaking to guest code.
> What it cares about is being able to consistently use a certain
> feature in their code.
> So i think it would be rather useless to implement it on Windows-only
> given there is a clear alternative to switch to fopen. Just my 2
> cents.

It's not switching to fopen() that is the issue - it's the interaction
with gdb (via gdbstub) which has no idea about the distinction. Anyway I
already have the patch queued with an additional note in the
documentation that all file accesses are in binary mode.

-- 
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro