Hasty Briefsbeta

Box of bugs (exploded): Perils of cross-platform development

9 days ago
  • #C programming
  • #debugging
  • #emulation
  • 86Box v5.0 release was timed for the 30th anniversary of Windows 95.
  • A bug was found in the 86Box emulator involving a null pointer dereference in the 'fseek' function.
  • The issue was discovered while emulating an IBM PS/2 model 55SX with an ATI 8514/A 2D accelerator.
  • Different C standard libraries (glibc, BSD libc, UCRT, musl) handle null pointers in 'fseek' differently.
  • The bug was fixed by removing the problematic 'fseek' call, resolving crashes in FreeBSD.
  • Static analysis tools like PVS-Studio can help detect such issues early.
  • The fix is included in the 86Box v5.1 release.