Forwarding invocation of variadic function in C

I had been brooding over how to do the RPC calls for variadic functions for some time now. Although marshalling any given variadic isn't really possible due to a lack of general method for obtaining argument count and sizes (see my weekly report #9, issues section), for commonly used stdio.h variadics such as printf and scanf, the arguments are well-defined by the format string so it should be possible to manually marshal these.

I'll be writing a seperate blog post about how I went about doing that, but for now I want to talk about a sub-problem of this: given a number of arguments, how do you forward these to a variadic function? A re-statement could be, how to "dynamically" invoke a variadic function?

Looking this up in the net, I've found these two discussions to be the most relevant:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/150543/forward-an-invocation-of-a-variadic-function-in-c

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1721655/passing-parameters-dynamically-to-variadic-functions

The second link mentions a library called FFCALL which can be used to pass parameters to variadics dynamically, and this probably is the ideal way of doing things.  

I may have found another method for this - so far as I've seen it works on x86 and ARM. It's based on the assumption that the last mandatory parameter and all the variadic parameters reside continuously in the memory, as well as lots of terrible coding practices, but it should be illustrative enough.

What I'm doing is basically copying a fixed number of bytes from the memory region (=stack) where the variadic parameters are located into a buffer, then passing this buffer to another variadic function which is called with a fixed number of arguments (I picked doubles since they are larger and will allocate more space on the called function's stack). The function then calls memcpy to overwrite its variadic args section with the passed buffer, and afterwards can call the stdarg macros to obtain the variadic arguments, or pass them to something like vprintf.

Here's the code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

void accepter(char *fmt, char *ptr, ...);

void forwarder(char *fmt, ...);

void forwarder(char *fmt, ...)

{

    double d = 9.1;

    char *buf = (char*) malloc(10*sizeof(double));

    memcpy(buf, (void*)((unsigned int)(&fmt)+sizeof(char*)), 80);

    FILE *o = fopen("tmp", "wb");

    fwrite(buf, 10, sizeof(double), o);

    fclose(o);

    // call function with 10 double arguments to open up stack space

    accepter(fmt, buf, d, d, d, d, d, d, d, d, d, d);

    free(buf);

}

void accepter(char *fmt, char *ptr, ...)

{

    memcpy((void*)((unsigned int)(&ptr)+sizeof(char*)), ptr, 10*sizeof(double));

    va_list ap;

    va_start(ap, ptr);

    vprintf(fmt, ap);

    va_end(ap);

}

int main()

{

    printf("Testing...\n");

    double d = 65.98;

    forwarder("%d %d %d ermm %s and more params! %x %f %x %x \n", 1, 2, 3, "hello world", 199, d , 0xdeadbeef, 0xbeefdead);

    return 0;

}

So what happened to the variadic marshaller?

As you may recall, I had a variadic marshaller I had been using for the RPC layer for some time now, which recently had to be dropped since it was causing trouble with passing float parameters. I wanted to talk about here a little bit since it's not really a specific problem concerning DSP or marshallers, but rather how certain arguments are passed to variadic functions.

Let's start by talking about what a variadic function is, since you may or may not have heard the term. A variadic function is a function that can take a varying number of arguments. There usually are a few "required" arguments but the sky (or rather, the bottom of the stack :)) is the limit. Sounds familiar? Yes indeed, probably the two most famous functions in the C library are variadic: printf and scanf.

Variadics in C are easily identifiable by their declarations, which looks something like this:

int summation_function(int count, ...)


notice the ellipsis ( ... ) - this is the notation used to state that there will be an arbitrary number of arguments here.

And for quick reference - accessing the variadic arguments is done via stdarg.h macros, for example:

va_list arg_list;
va_start(arg_list, count);
for(int i=0; i < count; i++)
{
  sum += va_arg(int);
}
va_end(arg_list);


whose detailed usage descriptions you can find easily by Googling.

Moving back to the problem I had with the variadic marshaller: I was passing regular 4-byte floats as arguments to be marshalled, but somehow the 4-byte region corresponding in the marshalled buffer always showed up to be corrupted somehow.

The issue was eventually revealed to be about the default argument promotions that are applied to variadics, as described in:

http://www.gnu.org/s/libc/manual/html_node/Calling-Variadics.html

therefore, any short int or char arguments passed are automatically promoted to int's, and all float's are casted into double's - thus having a 8 byte representation whose first 4 bytes don't really mean all that much :)

My initial idea was to simply cast the obtained double parameter back into a float before marshalling it into the buffer, but unfortunately this leads to loss of precision during double->float conversion. Therefore, I've decided to switch to using macros and doing the parameter marshalling directly inside the stubs. Comparing what the DSP-side stubs look like in the old vs. new methods of marshalling:

void rpc_mixedprint(int a, char b, float c, double d, short e, int f)

{

    rpc_marshal("rpc_mixedprint", "vicfdsi",a,b,c,d,e,f);

    rpc_perform();

}

versus

void rpc_mixedprint(int a, char b, float c, double d, short e, int f)
{
    RPC_INIT("rpc_mixedprint", "vicfdsi");
    RPC_PACK(int, &a);
    RPC_PACK(char, &b);
    RPC_PACK(float, &c);
    RPC_PACK(double, &d);
    RPC_PACK(short, &e);
    RPC_PACK(int, &f);
    RPC_PERFORM();
}


I'm aware it doesn't look quite as elegant as the variadic marshaller did... but in terms of ease of stub generation, it's not all that different, and there's no loss of data precision involved. And the GPP-side stub uses macros to extract the parameters as well, once the unmarshaller unpacks the buffer into the void** param_buffer:


void rpc_mixedprint(void **param_buffer, void *result_buffer)
{
    mixedprint(RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[0], int),
               RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[1], char),
               RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[2], float),
               RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[3], double),
               RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[4], short),
               RPC_CAST_PARAM(param_buffer[5], int)
              );
}