Glibc change exposing bugs
[Posted November 10, 2010 by corbet]
People experiencing sound corruption or other strange bugs on recent
distribution releases may want to have a look at this Fedora
bugzilla entry. It seems that the glibc folks changed
the implementation of memcpy() to one which, in theory, is
more highly optimized for current processors. Unfortunately, that change
exposes bugs in code where developers ignored the requirement that the
source and destination arrays passed to memcpy() cannot overlap. Various
workarounds have been posted, and the thread includes some choice comments
from Linus Torvalds, but the problem has been marked "not a bug." So we
may see more than the usual number of problems until all the projects with
sloppy mempcy() use get fixed. (Thanks to Sitsofe Wheeler).
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