/* Copyright (C) 1991-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of the GNU C Library. The GNU C Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The GNU C Library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with the GNU C Library; if not, see . */ #include #include #include #include struct environ_array *__environ_array_list; environ_counter __environ_counter; char * getenv (const char *name) { while (true) { /* Used to deal with concurrent unsetenv. */ environ_counter start_counter = atomic_load_acquire (&__environ_counter); /* We use relaxed MO for loading the string pointers because we assume the strings themselves are immutable and that loads through the string pointers carry a dependency. (This depends on the the release MO store to __environ in __add_to_environ.) Objects pointed to by pointers stored in the __environ array are never modified or deallocated (except perhaps if putenv is used, but then synchronization is the responsibility of the applications). The backing store for __environ is allocated zeroed. In summary, we can assume that the pointers we observe are either valid or null, and that only initialized string contents is visible. */ char **start_environ = atomic_load_relaxed (&__environ); if (start_environ == NULL || name[0] == '\0') return NULL; size_t len = strlen (name); for (char **ep = start_environ; ; ++ep) { char *entry = atomic_load_relaxed (ep); if (entry == NULL) break; /* If there is a match, return that value. It was valid at one point, so we can return it. */ if (name[0] == entry[0] && strncmp (name, entry, len) == 0 && entry[len] == '=') return entry + len + 1; } /* The variable was not found. This might be a false negative because unsetenv has shuffled around entries. Check if it is necessary to retry. */ /* See Hans Boehm, Can Seqlocks Get Along with Programming Language Memory Models?, Section 4. This is necessary so that loads in the loop above are not ordered past the counter check below. */ atomic_thread_fence_acquire (); if (atomic_load_acquire (&__environ_counter) == start_counter) /* If we reach this point and there was a concurrent unsetenv call which removed the key we tried to find, the NULL return value is valid. We can also try again, not find the value, and then return NULL (assuming there are no further concurrent unsetenv calls). However, if getenv is called to find a value that is present originally and not removed by any of the concurrent unsetenv calls, we must not return NULL here. If the counter did not change, there was at most one write to the array in unsetenv while the scanning loop above was running. This means that there are at most two different versions of the array to consider. For the sake of argument, we assume that each load can make an independent choice which version to use. An arbitrary number of unsetenv and setenv calls may have happened since start of getenv. Lets write E[0], E[1], ... for the original environment elements, a(0) < (1) < ... for a sequence of increasing integers that are the indices of the environment variables remaining after the removals, and N[0], N[1], ... for the new variables added by setenv or putenv. Then at the start of the last unsetenv call, the environment contains E[a(0)], E[a(1)], ..., N[0], N[1], ... (the N[0], N[1], .... are optional.) Let's assume that we are looking for the value E[j]. Then one of the a(i) == j (otherwise we may return NULL here because of a unsetenv for the value we are looking for). In the discussion below it will become clear that the N[k] do not actually matter. The two versions of array we can choose from differ only in one element, say E[a(i)]. There are two cases: Case (A): E[a(i)] is an element being removed by unsetenv (the target of the first write). We can see the original version: ..., E[a(i-1)], E[a(i)], E[a(i+1)], ..., N[0], ... ------- And the overwritten version: ..., E[a(i-1)], E[a(i+1)], E[a(i+1)], ..., N[0], ... --------- (The valueE[a(i+1)] can be the terminating NULL.) As discussed, we are not considering the removal of the variable being searched for, so a(i) != j, and the variable getenv is looking for is available in either version, and we would have found it above. Case (B): E[a(i)] is an element that has already been moved forward and is now itself being overwritten with its sucessor value E[a(i+1)]. The two versions of the array look like this: ..., E[a(i-1)], E[a(i)], E[a(i)], E[a(i+1)], ..., N[0], ... ------- And with the overwrite in place: ..., E[a(i-1)], E[a(i)], E[a(i+1)], E[a(i+1)], ..., N[0], ... --------- The key observation here is that even in the second version with the overwrite present, the scanning loop will still encounter the overwritten value E[a(i)] in the previous array element. This means that as long as the E[j] is still present among the initial E[a(...)] (as we assumed because there is no concurrent unsetenv for E[j]), we encounter it while scanning here in getenv. In summary, if there was at most one write, a negative result is a true negative, and we can return NULL. This is different from the seqlock paper, which retries if there was any write at all. It avoids the need for a second, unwritten copy for async-signal-safety. */ return NULL; /* If there was one more write, retry. This will never happen in a signal handler that interrupted unsetenv because the suspended unsetenv call cannot change the counter value. */ } } libc_hidden_def (getenv)