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# How Varnish met CHERI 6/N

## Varnish Socket Addresses

Socket addresses are a bit of a mess, in particular because nobody dared shake up all the IPv4 legacy code when IPv6 was introduced.

In varnish we encapsulate all that ugliness in a `struct suckaddr`, so named because it sucks that we have to spend time and code on this.

In a case like this, it makes sense to make the internals strictly read-only, to ensure nobody gets sneaky ideas:

    struct suckaddr *
    VSA_Build(void *d, const void *s, unsigned sal)
    {
        struct suckaddr *sua;

        [… lots of ugly stuff …]

        return (RO(sua));
    }

It would then seem logical to use C’s `const` to signal this fact, but since the current VSA api is currently defined such that users call `free(3)` on the suckaddrs when they are done with them, that does not work, because the prototype for `free(3)` is:

    void free(void *ptr);

So you cannot call it with a `const` pointer.

All hail the ISO-C standards committee!

This brings me to a soft point with CHERI: Allocators.

## How to free things with CHERI

A very common design-pattern in encapsulating classes look something like this:

    struct real_foo {
        struct foo foo;
        [some metadata about foo]
    };

    const struct foo *
    Make_Foo([arguments])
    {
        struct real_foo *rf;

        rf = calloc(1, sizeof *rf);
        if (rf == NULL)
            return (rf);
        [fill in rf]
        return (&rf->foo);
    }

    void
    Free_Foo(const struct foo **ptr)
    {
        const struct foo *fp;
        struct real_foo *rfp;

        assert(ptr != NULL);
        fp = *ptr;
        assert(fp != NULL);
        *ptr = NULL;

        rfp = (struct real_foo*)((uintptr_t)fp);
        [clean stuff up]
    }

We pass a `**ptr` to `Free_Foo()`, another varnish style-pattern, so we can NULL out the holding variable in the calling function, to avoid a dangling pointer to the now destroyed object from causing any kind of trouble later.

In the calling function this looks like:

    const struct foo *foo_ptr;
    […]
    Free_Foo(&foo_ptr);

If we use CHERI to make the foo truly `const` for the users of the API, we cannot, as above, wash the `const` away with a trip through `uintptr_t` and then write to the metadata.

The CHERI C/C++ manual, a terse academic tome, laconically mention that:

»Therefore, some additional work may be required to derive a pointer to the allocation’s metadata via another global capability, rather than the one that has been passed to free().«

Despite the understatement, I am very much in favour of this, because this is precisely why my own phkmalloc became a big hit twenty years ago: By firmly separating the metadata from the allocated space, several new classes of mistakes using the `malloc(3)` API could, and were, detected.

But this is going to be an embuggerance for CHERI users, because with CHERI getting from one pointer to different one is actual work.

The only “proper” solution is to build some kind of datastructure: List, tree, hash, DB2 database, pick any poison you prefer, and search out the metadata pointer using the impotent pointer as key. Given that CHERI pointers are huge, it may be a better idea to embed a numeric index in the object and use that as the key.

An important benefit of this »additional work« is that if your free-function gets passed a pointer to something else, you will find out, because it is not in your data-structure.

It would be a good idea if CHERI came with a quality implementation of “Find my other pointer”, so that nobody is forced to crack The Art of Computer Programming open for this.

When the API is “fire-and-forget” like VSA, in the sense that there is no metadata to clean up, we can leave the hard work to the `malloc(3)` implementation.

Ever since `phkmalloc` no relevant implementation of `malloc(3)` has dereferenced the freed pointer, in order to find the metadata for the allocation. Despite its non-const C prototype `free(3)`, will therefore happily handle a `const` or even CHERIed read-only pointer.

But you will have to scrub the `const` off with a `uintptr_t` to satisfy the C-compiler:

    void
    VSA_free(const struct suckaddr **vsap)
    {
        const struct suckaddr *vsa;

        AN(vsap);
        vsa = *vsap;
        *vsap = NULL;
        free((char *)(uintptr_t)vsa);
    }

Or in varnish style:

    void
    VSA_free(const struct suckaddr **vsap)
    {
        const struct suckaddr *vsa;

        TAKE_OBJ_NOTNULL(vsa, vsap, SUCKADDR_MAGIC);
        free(TRUST_ME(vsa));
    }

Having been all over this code now, I have decided to constify `struct suckaddr` in varnish, even without CHERI, it is sounder that way.

It is not bug, but CHERI made it a lot simpler and faster for me to explore the consequences of this change, so I will forfeit a score of “half a bug” to CHERI at this point.

/phk