epics-base/documentation/RELEASE-7.0.8.1.md

EPICS Release 7.0.8.1

Limit to _FORTIFY_SOURCE=2

GCC versions 12 and beyond and glibc have added some aggressive runtime checks for buffer overflows in libc functions at runtime, and the Ubuntu 2024.04 release increased their default gcc fortification level from 2 to 3. This has started causing EPICS Base builds to fail on that version, and other OS releases may make that configuration change with similar results. This release detects a compiler configured with _FORTIFY_SOURCE=3 and overrides it to 2. Later releases of Base will adjust the code, providing information to the compiler to avoid triggering these incorrect protections.

Fix issue with compress record

In Base 7.0.8, an update to the compress record was added to allow for certain algorithms to use partially filled buffers in their computations. Unfortunately, this broke the behaviour of the records in certain cases. This has been fixed.

Various minor changes

These included fixing minor memory leaks and documentation corrections. The SIZV field of lsi, lso and printf record VAL fields now can't exceed 32767 characters, to match an internal limit.

epicsSocketAccept() now returns SOCKET, not int

This might have some effect on downstream modules still using int, but the OS-specific osdSock.h headers which osiSock.h includes have all declared SOCKET (in most casese as a typedef for int) for many releases. This change removes a compiler warning on WIN32. Further details and the discussion about this change can be found here.

dbLoadRecords allows macros with default values

Previously the parser assumed that files containing macro substitutions were bad if no macro definitions were provided; that assumption was made incorrect once macro substitutions were allowed to provide a default value.

Hostname length limit in CA removed

Before this release, the CA client library only handled hostnames in address list environment variables up to 255 characters long. This limit has been removed.