[Interest] Segmentation fault on exiting Qt event loop

Roland Hughes roland at logikalsolutions.com
Thu Jan 3 14:29:14 CET 2019


On 1/3/2019 4:00 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> On 1/2/2019 4:00 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>>> I understand you're working with 4.8. I don't care.
>> That would by why there are hundreds, possibly thousands of companies
>> all supporting their own fork of Qt and even more moving away from Qt.
>>
>> They choose to use Qt.
>>
>> Takes them 1-4 years to get a product out the door which has a 10-20
>> year market life.
> And in those 10-20 years, they're going to get 20-40 updates of Qt.
No, they're not. They will get what they got with 4.8 and that's it. 
Some of their developers will periodically monitor "fixes" to later 
releases to see if such things can or should be applied to their source 
base. Many will just work around issues. Some shops reportedly fixed 
things in 4.8 they found, but the fix submission process was so onerous 
those fixes exist only in one shop.
>
>> By then, Qt has abandon them. There are __many__ medical devices running
>> 4.8 out in the real world saving lives today. We've had this discussion
>> before. Most likely he is working on a medical device as well since 4.8
>> seems to be the most popular in that world.
> Then they should acquire professional support for their devices, if they need
> to keep running on old, not-otherwise-supported versions. The community has
> limited resources and I'm not being paid a dime to support old versions, nor
> is the company I work for.
They end up supporting it themselves and banding with other 
non-competing companies to maintain a common distro.
>
> If you're choosing to stick to an old version, you MUST have a support
> mechanism for all your software (not just Qt) because of security issues. For
> example, Qt 4.8 is contemporaneous with OpenSSL 1.0.0 and Linux 3.1, both of
> which are full of known security issues. So you must either have the knowledge
> in-house or you must have an external contract to update those with fixes. It
> would be irresponsible to do otherwise. So why not the same for Qt?

Or you architect out everything which could be a security issue. There 
is no command line or terminal. The few medical devices I know of 
removed all support for inbound connections. The only method of 
accessing them is to take the screws out of the case, open it up and 
connect the custom debug board. Those few which do "connect" with 
external systems are required to initiate the connection themselves with 
a limited pre-configured on the device set of hosts. They push data up 
in a proprietary manner and, if needed, pull data in a proprietary 
manner, all from within a connection they initiate.

Do you really want a surgical robot which is cutting on you running a PC 
OS on a PC processor able to connect to the Internet? Some little hacker 
poking around looking for financial/identity information could 
accidentally have it remove your heart instead of your appendix.

I only know of one medical system that touches the patient where some 
Phd. fool touting their John's Hopkins creds planned on using "either 
Windows or Ubuntu desktop" to run it. They spent in excess of a year 
(might still be) talking to senior tech people looking for an 
"architect" to "design" the system, yet wouldn't let them take it off 
the desktop. Yeah, I was one they talked with and I hung up on them. It 
was a clot monitor for post-op patients too. If they __ever__ manage to 
push that through FDA (and I cannot see how it would ever make it 
running on _any_ desktop) they will be in those late night 800 number 
lawyer commercials for exactly the same reasons you are talking about. 
An out of the box desktop has gaping security issues well known on the 
Dark Web. Adding insult to injury, anything else could be installed on 
there. A user will have to be logged in with the application running 
which means anyone who is bored could rotate around to watch cat videos 
on You-tube.

Control systems have to be sealed.

Now, if you want a catcher app which runs on any desktop and listens to 
packets broadcast by a control system, that is completely different. 
They wanted the control system on the desktop.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630) 205-1593

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