kitepilot wrote:
[ some code showing that null pointer dereference on Linux results in
a seg fault, while it just returns 0 on AIX.]
Yes, that is indeed the way it works. On the PDP-11, where much of
the early (not earliest) UNIX code was written, there was no hardware
support for separate instruction and data mapping. Code was loaded
at virtual address 0. On most machines, a null-pointer dereference
simply loads the contents of address 0. It happened that the first
byte of crt0.o on the PDP-11 had the value 0. So, on the PDP-11,
a null pointer dereference returned 0. This resulted in some applications
dereferencing null pointers and expecting a 0 value and not a seg fault.
When UNIX was ported to other machines, on some a null pointer dereference
would seg fault and on others it would return a non-zero value.[1] Both
of these required additional effort to fix the bug in the original
application code. However, some of these bugs didn't show up until
the applications had shipped. Other bugs were in customer code. In
both cases, customers viewed it as a porting issue. My program didn't
have any problems when I ran it on PDP-11 UNIX, but it breaks when I
recompile it and run it on AIX on your hardware.
As a result, IBM modified AIX to return a 0 on a null-pointer in order
to be bug-compatible with UNIX on a PDP-11. Other vendors did the
same. On the Motorola 680XX-based systems that I developed UNIX for
during that timeframe, by default, a null pointer reference would
seg fault. However, if an otherwise unused bit was set in the executable
file's header, a null pointer would return 0 as a workaround, so customers
didn't have to debug their broken programs.
-Dale
[1] I remember an amusing example in the source code to the cpio program
for System III UNIX, IIRC. The original code had a check for a null
pointer. Instead of doing:
if (p != NULL)
it used
if (*p != '\0')
When that code was ported to another machine, that code no longer worked
and was changed to
if (*p != '\0' && *p != 'G')
and that was the way I found the code. Apparently, on the machine to
which the program had been "ported", a null pointer dereference of a
(char *) would return the character G instead of 0. Yes, I had a good
laugh when I found that one.
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