PHP floating point bug possibly misinterpreted
Michael Cronenworth
mike at cchtml.com
Thu Jan 13 19:24:08 UTC 2011
PHP recently underwent a bit of a security crisis when many media
outlets disclosed the presence of a floating point bug. (RH bug here[1])
I feel I should bring attention to a PHP developer response[2] to this
bug. Warning: There is a bit of emotion inside. They feel it is a gcc
bug in FP handling, which seems (in my limited knowledge) to be
accurate. The gcc fix was provided, not by changing default behavior,
but by a compiler flag "-fexcess-precision=standard". Since this is a
gcc bug (I believe bug is the right term) this could affect any gcc
compiled code for the x86 arch that uses FP. Should the default gcc
compiler flag set include the new flag?
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=667806
[2] http://blog.andreas.org/display?id=9
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