• [$] An API for handling arithmetic overflow

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Thu Apr 9 06:40:09 2026


    On March 31, Kees Cook shared

    a patch set that represents the culmination of more than a year of work
    toward eliminating the possibility of silent, unintentional integer overflow in the kernel. Linus Torvalds was

    not pleased with the approach, leading to a detailed discussion about the meaning of "safe" integer operations and the design of APIs for handling integer
    overflows. Eventually, the developers involved reached a consensus for a different API that should make handling overflow errors in the kernel much less of a hassle.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1065889/
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