Peter Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 13:26 +0100, Marco Gerards wrote: > >> It's not acceptable to me to just remove the nested functions because >> someone broke some unofficial build of gcc. When an executable stack >> is not available, there are the following options (as I see them): > > I could be wrong, but GCC appears not to have official builds. For any > platform.
Right, what I meant to say is an official release. A documented feature from gcc was simply discarded. > That being said, what's the reasoning for using this uncommon and > lossely defined extension in the first place? The way GRUB (both 2 and > Legacy) uses nested functions, it's no better than just having a method > vector, and certainly not easier to read. Not only that, but the trend > going forward is towards *less* support of executable stacks, not more. > I wouldn't expect that to stop with us and for Apple, especially now > that there's widespread support for non-executable pages on Intel > hardware. > > For that matter, is there a specific intent to use GNU C rather than > ANSI/ISO C? I haven't extensively read the list archives, so feel free > to point me at them if this has been widely discussed. It's a GNU feature, GRUB is a GNU project. And it is widely used in GRUB 2, we like GNU99 (or at least I do). So if you are looking at this from that perspective, it is not that uncommon or weird at all. > Are you saying you don't want Would you be amicable to patches which > change code from using nested functions to a more C-like implementation? > (I don't mean like the patch in my current GRUB Legacy package; > something cleaner than that hacky approach.) Right. If there is no good reason for such thing (some random gcc hack isn't a good reason for me), I see no reason to change it. >> Enable the executable stack using: >> 1) Set some bit in the ELF file so the OS knows we want this >> (that's what linux does). >> 2) Enable it using some function. >> 3) Creating our own stack. > > There's a major point of contention being ignored here. OS vendors > don't want to ship executables which require an executable stack. Full > stop. Please give me one good reason why GRUB shouldn't use an executable stack. I don't see a good reason besides the more general "We don't want to have executable stacks at all". >> So on the apple the right thing to do would be: >> >> 1) Fix gcc so nested functions are not fatal. > >>From many points of view, this would not be "fixing" GCC. > >> 2) fix GRUB using the methods I described above. > > Likewise. Why wouldn't it be? Anyways, it would be nice if gcc could support nested functions by using something else than an executable stack. Thanks, Marco _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel