[OpenBIOS] Sparc32 "see" crashes on "" literals

[Tarl Neustaedter]

Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> [...]
> See patch.. There seems to be another oddity in " which caused me to use
> s" instead of " in nvram.fs... Who finds the remaining problem? ;-)
>   

What's the distinction between s" and " ?

One of the persistent problems we run into at Sun (in particular 
relating to NVRAM and properties being passed to Solaris) is the 
dichotomy between counted strings and null-terminated strings. A string 
constant ( " ) is a counted string, but supposedly with a terminating 
null outside the count, which ensures that any C-code doesn't barf on 
being passed a pointer to the string. The problem often arises when 
string constants are copied, which doesn't necessarily bring along the 
null terminator - passing such a copied string can cause problems in 
careless C code.

An example I recall was code in Solaris' consconfig.c which would 
complain when it didn't like the values it found in ttya-mode. It would 
print out an error message using sprintf's %s to reference the property, 
and that could run off the end of the universe. Another example was in 
comparisons for property values, where sometimes a string value for a 
property /included/ a terminating null byte (depending on how the 
property was created) and sometimes didn't - which could cause problems 
in not being able to match values.