deprecating sprintf(9)

[mdf at FreeBSD.org]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Rink Springer <rink at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 08:51:57AM -0700, mdf at FreeBSD.org wrote:
>> It seems like a large project, but OTOH sprintf(9) is mighty unsafe in
>> the kernel.  It's disapproved of for user-space as being unsafe for
>> security reasons as well, but the potential downsides aren't the same,
>> and we'll never clean up ports anyways. :-)
>
> Deprecating it may be usable, yet I don't believe we can easily enforce
> such a policy [1].

If the kernel sources don't use it then the prototype can be removed.

> Have you looked at how many (potentially) unsecure
> uses there are in the kernel, to give an idea how useful such an effort
> would be?

I presume all the kernel uses are safe at the moment, but it's an
error prone construction.

As of this morning grep found 1277 occurrences of sprintf(9) in sys/
and 23 occurrences of vsprintf(9) in sys/.

Thanks,
matthew