[Pixman] Use of uninitialized values (?)

[Søren Sandmann]

Siarhei Siamashka <siarhei.siamashka at gmail.com> writes:

> As a workaround (instead of plugging such holes all over the place),
> we might allocate the temporary buffers for general path, initialize
> them once and keep the pointers to these buffers in TLS. However this
> is not very nice and may hide real problems.

If we did this, it might make sense to allocate a large array, and then
hand out chunks of that array dynamically. Such a memory allocator could
be pretty simple if all allocated memory was considered freed at the end
of each composite operation. E.g., at the beginning of
pixman_image_composite() a 'current' pointer, also stored in TLS, would
be initialized to the array, and then some utility function would just
hand out new chunks as needed.

- Iterators could be dynamically allocated which would mean the structs
  didn't have to be public, so individual implementations could put
  whatever fields they wanted into the structs instead of relying on
  these fields:

    /* These fields are scratch data that implementations can use */
    void *                      data;
    uint8_t *                   bits;
    int                         stride;

- The temporary scanlines for the separable scalers could be allocated
  this way.

I'm not sure this is worth the complexity though.

> By the way, going through the general path is not very good for
> performance. It would be really interesting to see why it does not
> hit some sse2 optimized fast path in this particular case.

Using a gradient source will cause this fallback.

Of course writing SSE/SSE2 (or AVX/AVX2 for people with Haswell
hardware) iterators for radial or linear gradients would be an excellent
way for someone to spend their Christmas vacation.


Søren