On Sat, 7 May 2022, Soft Works wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel-boun...@ffmpeg.org> On Behalf Of
Martin Storsjö
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2022 2:48 PM
To: ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org
Subject: [FFmpeg-devel] av_fopen_utf8 and cross-DLL CRT object sharing
issue on Windows

Hi,

I just became aware of the av_fopen_utf8 function - which was
introduced
to fix path name translations on Windows - actually has a notable
design
flaw.

Hi Martin,

I just became aware that somebody would be compiling ffmpeg like
this on Windows and I'm curious regarding the whereabouts..

Background:

On Windows, a process can contain more than one C runtime (CRT); the
system comes with two shared ones (UCRT and msvcrt.dll) and in MSVC
builds, each DLL/EXE can have one statically linked in instead of
linking
against a shared library CRT (and that's actually the default
configuration when building with MSVC).

The default configuration for both, EXE and DLL projects is to link
to the C runtime dynamically (crt dll).

No, that's not true. If you invoke e.g. "cl.exe myprog.c" without explicitly passing either -MD or -MT, the default is -MT, which is to statically link the CRT.

This means that CRT objects (file descriptors from open(), FILE*
opened
with fopen/fdopen) mustn't be shared across DLLs; such an object must
be
opened, accessed and closed within the same DLL.

This only happens when you explicitly modify the build configuration
to statically link to the CRT.

No, this is not a custom build configuration. This is the build configuration you get if you configure with "configure --enable-shared --toolchain=msvc".

Why are you compiling it this way?
Your earlier patch is from 2013, so you seem to be doing so for
quite a while.

It's not that I'm shipping a production setup built this way. I just spent a fair amount of work to make ffmpeg work when built with MSVC; both built as static libraries and as DLLs. And I'd like to keep that working. Not only on the "seems to work for whatever is covered by fate" level, but also on the level of not using constructs that are known to not work.

As av_fopen_utf8 gets duplicated across the libraries by being in the same source file as the other functions, it works for all uses across the libraries, but doesn't work for uses outside of the libraries (fftools, external API users). That's why I'm hesitant against increasing the use of this function in fftools until we have resolve this issue.

Also, another fairly common situation where the "different CRTs" scenario happens if you'd e.g. build the ffmpeg libraries as DLLs with mingw, but then link against those DLLs with a user application built with MSVC. Then it's not an issue with the function between the libraries, but it is an issue for use of av_fopen_utf8 in the user's code outside of libav*.

Is the file API the only case where you had any trouble?

As far as I remember, that was the only case of cross-library resource sharing issue I ran into at the time.

I don't have experience with that kind of setup, but I would have thought that with separate CRTs, you could already get into trouble when you would allocate a string in the main application which you pass to any of the DLL's APIs and which might get freed by the DLL at a later time - doesn't that fail?

No, it doesn't (as Andreas explained).

// Martin
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