Re: [PATCH v2] config.mak.uname: update settings for FreeBSD

From: Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón <carenas@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 12, 2025, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <p75inuvm6uf4mul7gty4jpwd74namlgfifkqgwuwzf6sqrkit5@zkimsfgxatmc>
In-Reply-To: <aEsE8S90fJSr9Or5@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 04:48:49PM -0800, brian m. carlson wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> On 2025-06-12 at 13:52:03, Carlo Arenas wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 12:36:46AM -0800, Brad Smith wrote:
> > >
> > > FreeBSD 6.0 has memmem().
> > 
> > but AFAIK it was buggy, uncompatible with the "standard" and
> > didn't perform that well, at least until FreeBSD 12.
> > 
> > assuming that the system version is indeed faster than the
> > one provided with git (which should be true but worth testing)
> > then it might be better to only enable this for later versions?
> 
> FreeBSD 11.4 (the last version of FreeBSD 11) went end of life in
> September 2021, so nobody should be using it since it hasn't had
> security support since then.  And it's even been functional (but slow)
> since FreeBSD 11.0, and 10.4 went EOL in 2018.  So users shouldn't
> actually be experiencing any actual functionality problems since then.
> 
> I don't think it's a big deal for people who want to use an obsolete OS
> (which, to be clear, I'm not encouraging) to tweak the Makefile knobs a
> bit.

Note that my concern wasn't about having to tweak the Makefile, but with the fact that the system provided function would behave differently, and there was no attempt to see if by no longer using the git provided compat code, there was actually a performance improvement.

It is true that in our codebase there are no calls to memmem() where the needlelen (the fourth parameter) could be zero, and that would result in some of those old versions returning NULL, but it would seem to be safer to only use the system provided function when those issues are no longer a concern.

Carlo