Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] virtio-rng: Add human-readable error message for negative max-bytes parameter

[Markus Armbruster]

John Snow <address@hidden> writes:

> On 07/21/2014 03:48 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>>
>> It certainly could check whether the value fits into uint64_t.
>>
>> A quick peek at how string-input-visitor.c uses strtoll() makes me
>> cringe.
>>
>> [...]
>
> What I meant by that was to say that by the time a value was returned
> to visit_type_uint64, the value has already been possibly converted
> implicitly from a negative value, and we can't tell at this level if
> that happened without re-inspecting the string we were passed. At that
> point, why not just fix the string parsing mechanics one more layer
> down in parse_type_int() -- or by creating another routine primitive;
> i.e parse_type_uint.
>
> As Eric Blake noted elsewhere in the thread, it would be nice to have
> the ability to have three behaviors at the lowest level -- signed,
> unsigned with wraparound, and unsigned strict. The biggest question in
> my mind is how to add the property flag to allow authors to opt-in to
> the unsigned with wraparound option, where the unsigned strict option
> makes the most sense to me as a default.

Do we have a use case for silently mapping negative numbers to positive
ones?

> For now I will just fix the error message. We can draft ideas for how
> to fix the semantic issues in parsing later.

Yes, that makes sense.