This is needed to support CHERI, and thus Arm's experimental Morello
prototype, where pointers are implemented using unforgeable capabilities
that include bounds and permissions metadata to provide fine-grained
spatial and referential memory safety, as well as revocation by sweeping
memory to provide heap temporal memory safety.
On most systems (anything with a flat memory hierarchy rather than using
segment-based addressing), size_t and uintptr_t are the same type.
However, on CHERI, size_t is just an integer offset, whereas uintptr_t
is still a capability as described above. Casting a pointer to size_t
will strip the metadata and validity tag, and casting from size_t to a
pointer will result in a null-derived capability whose validity tag is
not set, and thus cannot be dereferenced without faulting.
The audio and cursor casts were harmless as they intend to stuff an
integer into a pointer, but using uintptr_t is the idiomatic way to do
that and silences our compiler warnings (which our build tool makes
fatal by default as they often indicate real problems). The iconv and
egl casts were true positives as SDL_iconv_t and iconv_t are pointer
types, as is NativeDisplayType on most OSes, so this would have trapped
at run time when using the round-tripped pointers. The gles2 casts were
also harmless; the OpenGL API defines this argument to be a pointer type
(and uses the argument name "pointer"), but it in fact represents an
integer offset, so like audio and cursor the additional idiomatic cast
is needed to silence the warning.
The internal function SDL_EGL_LoadLibrary() did not delete and remove a mostly
uninitialized data structure if loading the library first failed. A later try to
use EGL then skipped initialization and assumed it was previously successful
because the data structure now already existed. This led to at least one crash
in the internal function SDL_EGL_ChooseConfig() because a NULL pointer was
dereferenced to make a call to eglBindAPI().
Sam Lantinga
Jessica Clarke
Ethan Lee
Ryan C. Gordon
Philipp Wiesemann