read(2) and thus bsdiff is limited to 2^31 bytes

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 03:56:33PM -0700, Conrad Meyer wrote:
> On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Dirk Engling <erdgeist at erdgeist.org> wrote:
> > When trying to bsdiff two DVD images, I noticed it failing due to
> > read(2) returning EINVAL to the tool. man 2 read says, this would only
> > happen for a negative value for fildes, which clearly was not true.
> 
> Actually, it's documented at the very bottom of the first section:
> 
> ERRORS
>      The read(), readv(), pread() and preadv() system calls will succeed
>      unless:
> ...
>      [EINVAL]           The value nbytes is greater than INT_MAX.
> 
> It does seem silly to me given nbytes is a size_t.  I think it should
> error if nbytes is greater than SSIZE_T_MAX, but on platforms where
> size_t is larger than int (e.g. amd64) it shouldn't error for nbytes
> in [INT_MAX, SSIZE_T_MAX - 1].

There are a lot of valid reasons for not doing arbitrarily large
operations, especially since a certain amount of atomicity is expected
for local IO. That doesn't mean that it can't be turned into a short
read/write instead. Erroring out seeems completely unjustified.

Joerg