Stop an unhandled error from exiting zero
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An unhandled error could kill the process and still report success. The
default handler ended in exit(errctx->status), and an exit status is one
byte wide: the kernel keeps the low 8 bits of the argument and discards
the rest. Consumer statuses start at AKERR_FIRST_CONSUMER_STATUS (256),
so the first status any consumer can reserve exited 0 and a shell saw a
clean run. Status 300 exited 44, an unrelated error's code.

There is no wider exit() to reach for. _exit(), _Exit(), quick_exit()
and the raw exit_group syscall all truncate identically, and even
waitid(), whose si_status is a full int, reports the truncated value --
the truncation happened before the parent looked.

akerr_exit() now owns that mapping and the default handler calls it: 0
exits 0, 1 through 255 exit the status, and anything else exits
AKERR_EXIT_STATUS_UNREPRESENTABLE (125) rather than a low byte that is
either a lie or a claim of success. Only values that were already being
delivered wrong behave differently. Call it instead of exit() anywhere
you leave the process on a status; it is declared AKERR_NORETURN.

akerr_exit(0) exits 0, because 0 is this library's success status. That
is not a hole in the rule: PROCESS opens with case 0, which marks a zero
status handled, so a successful context never reaches FINISH_NORETURN's
call to the handler at all.

tests/err_exit_status.c drives one table through akerr_exit() and
through the default handler in forked children and requires identical
exit codes, so the handler cannot grow a mapping of its own. With the
clamp removed it fails with "akerr_exit(256) exited 0, want 125". The
full-width status was already reaching the log and still does, which the
same test asserts against the captured stack trace.

2.0.1. No ABI break: the soname stays libakerror.so.2 and nothing that
already existed changed shape. akerr_exit() is a new exported symbol, so
a consumer that starts calling it needs 2.0.1 at link time.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-01 07:25:37 -04:00
parent 756933c600
commit 5eaa956f50
8 changed files with 435 additions and 10 deletions

View File

@@ -88,6 +88,16 @@ locked body does the work, and a thin wrapper takes the lock, calls it, and
releases it on the single return path. Do not call consumer code
(`akerr_log_method`, `akerr_handler_unhandled_error`) while holding it.
**Exiting.** Never call `exit()` with a status value. Call `akerr_exit()`, which
owns the one mapping from an akerr status to an exit code: an exit status is a
byte, and every consumer status starts at 256, so passing a status through
`exit()` silently truncates it — status 256 exits 0 and reports success. The
only exits that bypass it are the two that have no status to map, both in
`src/error.c`: `ENSURE_ERROR_READY`'s pool-exhaustion abort and the NULL-context
case in `akerr_default_handler_unhandled_error()`. This rule applies to test
programs too, except where the test's whole point is to observe the raw
truncation.
## Testing Guidelines
Add tests as `tests/err_<behavior>.c`. Register each new test in the