erl_interface/ei refused to use node names with an alive name (the part of the node name preceding the @ sign) longer than 63 characters and a host name longer than 64 characters. The total amount of characters allowed in a node name (alivename@hostname) was thus limited to 128 characters. These limits applied both to the own node name as well as node names of other nodes. Ordinary Erlang nodes limit the node name length to 256 characters, which meant that you could not communicate with certain Erlang nodes due to their node name used.

erl_interface/ei now allow the total amount of characters in a node name to be up to 256 characters. These characters may be distributed between alive name and host name in whatever way needed. That is, the maximum amount of characters in the alive name may be 254 and the maximum amount of characters in the host name may be 254, but in total the node name must not exceed 256 characters.

Own Id: OTP-15781 Aux Id: ERIERL-356

Fix handling of Makefile dependencies so that parallel make works properly.

Own Id: OTP-15757

Fixed two bugs in the erl_call program. A missing initialization (introduced in erl_interface-3.11) which either caused a crash or failure to connect to or start a node, and an incorrectly calculated timeout which could cause failure to start an erlang node. These bugs only caused failures on some platforms.

Own Id: OTP-15676 Aux Id: OTP-15442, ERL-881

Support for plugin of a user supplied socket implementation has been added.

Own Id: OTP-15442 Aux Id: ERIERL-258

Make ei_connect and friends also accept state ok_simultaneous during handshake, which means the other node has initiated a connection setup that will be cancelled in favor of this connection.

Own Id: OTP-15161 Aux Id: ERIERL-191

Fixed bug in ei_receive_msg, ei_xreceive_msg, ei_receive_msg_tmo and ei_xreceive_msg_tmo. The x->index was set to entire buffer size instead of the number of bytes actually received.

Own Id: OTP-15171

Fixed bug in ei_connect_init which could be provoked if called by concurrent threads. ei_connect_init called posix interface gethostbyname which is documented as not thread safe.

Own Id: OTP-15191

Fixed bug in erl_compare_ext() ignoring the tail of lists of otherwise equal content. Example: [a | b] and [a | c] compared equal and {[a], b} and {[a], c} compared equal.

Own Id: OTP-15277 Aux Id: PR-1929

Fix bug where calling erl_init on certain platforms could result in a buffer overflow bug.

Own Id: OTP-15033

Fixed erl_call -m to not deallocate module source binary before it has been read.

Own Id: OTP-15105 Aux Id: ERL-629

The program erl_call calls erl_eval:eval_str/1 when it used to call lib:eval_str/1. This means that erl_call will fail when trying interact with an Erlang node running Erlang/OTP 20 or earlier.

Own Id: OTP-15114 Aux Id: OTP-15072, ERL-634

Make ei_connect and friends also accept state ok_simultaneous during handshake, which means the other node has initiated a connection setup that will be cancelled in favor of this connection.

Own Id: OTP-15161 Aux Id: ERIERL-191

Fix bug in ei_connect functions that may cause failure due to insufficient buffer space for gethostbyname_r.

Own Id: OTP-15022 Aux Id: ERIERL-163

Optimize encoding/decoding for pure 7-bit ascii atoms.

Own Id: OTP-15023 Aux Id: ERIERL-150

Removed all old unused files in the documentation.

Own Id: OTP-14475 Aux Id: ERL-409, PR-1493

Fix bug where gethostname would incorrectly fail with enametoolong on Linux.

Own Id: OTP-14310

Remove generation of atoms in old latin1 external format in the distribution between erlang nodes, erl_interface, and jinterface. The new utf8 format for atoms was introduced in OTP R16. An OTP 20 node can therefore not connect to nodes older than R16.

Atoms that can be encoded using latin1 are still encoded by term_to_binary() using latin1 encoding. Note that all atoms will by default be encoded using utf8 in a future Erlang/OTP release. For more information see the documentation of erlang:term_to_binary/2.

Own Id: OTP-14337

Minor documentation update

Own Id: OTP-14233 Aux Id: PR-1343

Fix ei_connect_init and ei_connect_xinit to adjust the creation argument to be compatible with nodes older than OTP-19.

Own Id: OTP-13981

Editorial documentation changes

Own Id: OTP-13980

Look for .erlang.cookie in windows system directory if HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH is not set. The same behaviour as the VM.

Own Id: OTP-13849

Fix decoding of LLONG_MIN in erl_decode

Own Id: OTP-13666 Aux Id: ERL-158

On windows ei_decode_ulong and ei_decode_long now correctly returns an error when trying to decode a number that does not fit in a long. Fixed a bug on windows where enabling ei tracing would cause a segmentation fault.

Own Id: OTP-13673

Handle terms (pids,ports and refs) from nodes with a 'creation' value larger than 3. This is a preparation of the distribution protocol to allow OTP 19 nodes to correctly communicate with future nodes (20 or higher). The 'creation' value differentiates different incarnations of the same node (name).

Own Id: OTP-13488

Fix Erl_Interface build error on Debian/Hurd and Debian/kFreeBSD. (Thanks to Sergei Golovan)

Own Id: OTP-13328

EPMD supports both IPv4 and IPv6

Also affects oldest supported windows version.

Own Id: OTP-13364

Fix the conditional selection of gethostbyname_r and gethostbyaddr_r.

Own Id: OTP-13188

Do not accept Nan and Infinity values

Erlang does not accept these values, so we return an error in the C interface rather than letting them through to the Erlang VM, which rejects the message with a somewhat cryptic "bad external term".

Own Id: OTP-12801

Use C99 function isfinite() instead of finite() when available on non GCC compilers.

Own Id: OTP-12268

Distribute autoconf helpers to applications at build time instead of having multiple identical copies committed in the repository.

Own Id: OTP-12348

Added an .appup file for the application.

Own Id: OTP-12358 Aux Id: OTP-12178

Added a .app file for the application.

Own Id: OTP-12178

Implement --enable-sanitizers[=sanitizers]. Similar to debugging with Valgrind, it's very useful to enable -fsanitize= switches to catch bugs at runtime.

Own Id: OTP-12153

Now works with Visual Studio.

Own Id: OTP-11984

Fix memcheck warning in gen_challange (Thanks to Olivier Girondel)

Own Id: OTP-11608

Silence warnings (Thanks to Anthony Ramine)

Own Id: OTP-11517

Introduced functionality for inspection of system and build configuration.

Own Id: OTP-11196

Header and library files from ic and erl_interface are now installed into usr/{include,lib}. Note that these directories are unversioned, so the latest installed version will be the one in the directory.

Own Id: OTP-11284

Fix location of true binary under Mac OSX. Thanks to Simon Cornish.

Own Id: OTP-11289

A guard was added to check if file descriptor is valid before closing it.

Own Id: OTP-11167

Superfluous trailing comma in enum erlang_char_encoding causing compile error for g++ with --pedantic option.

Own Id: OTP-10913 Aux Id: seq12264

Revert the structs erlang_pid, erlang_port and erlang_ref as they were before R16A (without node_org_enc) in order to be backward compatible with user code that accesses the fields of these structs.

Own Id: OTP-10885 Aux Id: seq12256

Where necessary a comment stating encoding has been added to Erlang files. The comment is meant to be removed in Erlang/OTP R17B when UTF-8 becomes the default encoding.

Own Id: OTP-10630

Limited support for unicode atoms in the external format and in the internal representation of the vm. This is a preparative feature in order to support communication with future releases of Erlang/OTP that may create unicode atoms.

Own Id: OTP-10753

Teach lib/erl_interface/configure.in to look for pthreads support in libc (where it can be found on QNX)

A minor tweak such that this configure *fails* if you pass --enable-threads and no pthreads support can be found.

Own Id: OTP-10581

Detect when middle endian doubles are used by a platform and account for it when decoding floats. (Thanks to Mike Sperber)

Own Id: OTP-10209

Minor suppressions and fixes of compilation warnings

Own Id: OTP-10016

An error when getting global names on OS X Lion has been fixed. The error caused truncated strings to be returned from the function.

Own Id: OTP-9799

Erlang/OTP can now be built using parallel make if you limit the number of jobs, for instance using 'make -j6' or 'make -j10'. 'make -j' does not work at the moment because of some missing dependencies.

Own Id: OTP-9451

Eliminate use of deprecated regexp module

Own Id: OTP-9810

Align ei buffer according to size of pointers

Own Id: OTP-9390

XML files have been corrected.

Own Id: OTP-9550 Aux Id: OTP-9541

Make comment and documentation reflect code in erl_interface/src/misc/ei_decode_term.c (Thanks to Anneli Cuss)

Own Id: OTP-9559

ei: integer overflow in string/atom encoding

ei_encode_atom() and ei_encode_string() use strlen() to get the length of the buffer. As strlen() returns an unsigned long long and both ei functions take a signed integer, the length fields may overflow.

Check so that the results of strlen can be held in a signed integer. (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-9530

Fix using sizeof() for array given as function argument

When using the sizeof() operator for an array given as function argument it returns the size of the pointer. In this case, the affected function hex(char digest[16], char buff[33]) will just print 4 or 8 byte instead of the full length of 16 bytes, on 32bit and 64bit systems respectively. (Thanks to Cristian greco)

Own Id: OTP-9151

Initialize to and to_name in erl_receive_msg. (Thanks to Göran Larsson)

Own Id: OTP-9241

erl_interface: fix compile error(Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-9252

Some malformed distribution messages could cause VM to crash, this is now corrected.

Own Id: OTP-8993

Strengthen string copy check (Thanks to Michael Santos).

Own Id: OTP-9071

Strengthen atom length check when decoding atoms (Thanks to Michael Santos).

Own Id: OTP-9072

Fix global registration. C node needed DFLAG_DIST_MONITOR_FLAT set when connecting. Fix list compare in erl_compare_ext to return correct result. (Thanks to Vitaliy Batichko and Evgeny Khirin)

Own Id: OTP-9015

erl_call: remove get_hostent

get_hostent does not properly handle IPv4 addresses on little endian platforms and fails with hostnames beginning with a number. Remove get_hostent and use ei_gethostbyname directly since gethostbyname supports IPv4 addresses.

(Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8890

teach ei_x_format to handle unary - and + (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)

Own Id: OTP-8891

Fix zero byte allocation in registry. (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8893

Check the length of the node name to prevent an overflow. Memory error control of ei_alloc_big. (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8943

erl_term_len() in erl_interface could returned too large values for integers (since R14B) and too small values for refs (since R9B).

Own Id: OTP-8945

The erl_interface tracelevel for erlang messages was incorrect. This has now been fixed.

Own Id: OTP-8874

Removed unused variable in ei_decode_term.c.

Fixed faulty deallocation in erl_call.

Own Id: OTP-8748

ei_connect: correct man page examples (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8813

ei: prevent overflow in ei_connect_init and ei_xconnect

Add length check of the buffer before copying. (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8814

Remove DECLSPEC feature which fails on Windows Vista and use the fallback implementation instead.

Own Id: OTP-8826

erl_call: fix multiple buffer overflows (Thanks to Michael Santos)

Own Id: OTP-8827

Fix incorrect writev iovec buffer handling in erl_interface (Thanks to Steve Vinoski)

Own Id: OTP-8837

compact IEEE 754 double encoding in external binary format for ei

These changes are based on an ei float patch from Serge Aleynikov originally submitted against R12B-2 in July 2008 and reworked by Steve Vinoski May 2010.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-8684

Document debug support.

Debug trace output for connection activity could be enabled setting the trace level as an integer to the EI_TRACELEVEL environment variable. This option could also be read and set from a running program using ei_get_tracelevel(void) and ei_set_tracelevel(int).

Own Id: OTP-5037

Cross compilation improvements and other build system improvements.

Most notable:

(Thanks to Henrik Riomar for suggestions and testing)

(Thanks to Winston Smith for the AVR32-Linux cross configuration and testing)

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-8323

Change erroneous "\\0" in documentation files erl_notes.xml and erl_eterm.xml.

Own Id: OTP-8326

Allow erl_match() to match ERL_LONGLONG and ERL_U_LONGLONG terms (Thanks to Scott Lystig Fritchie).

Own Id: OTP-8400

The documentation is now built with open source tools (xsltproc and fop) that exists on most platforms. One visible change is that the frames are removed.

Own Id: OTP-8201

The manual states that erl_receive() return the reason in the ErlMessage struct. This was not the case and the function is now corrected.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-4969

In send_exit.c an errorneous size of memory allocation could occur when reallocating a buffer.

In ei_decode_trace.c the index could be updated when the decoding failed.

In ei_printterm.c the index could be updated when the decoding failed in lists and tuples.

In ei_decode_term.c when decoding a double (ERL_FLOAT_EXT) no check was done to ensure that the last of the 31 bytes was null terminated.

In ei_decode_term.c when decoding references, only the first 3 bytes are read, but the index did not increment by the total size.

In ei_decode_fun.c no check of correct buffer allocation or data length was done.

In ei_decode_string.c the integer list string case did not decode the NIL tail correctly.

These errors has now been fixed. (Thanks to Romain Lenglet, Paul Mineiro and Paul Guyot).

Own Id: OTP-6117

ei_decode_big could be decoded with a garbage byte.

ei_encode_big and ei_x_encode_big is now available.

Own Id: OTP-7554

The function erl_init_resolve() did not conform to C99 standard which caused a build error on some platforms. This has now been fixed.

Own Id: OTP-8093

Makefile.in has been updated to use the LDFLAGS environment variable (if set). (Thanks to Davide Pesavento.)

Own Id: OTP-8157

Added support for 64-bit integers in encoding/decoding.

Added support for better printouts of binaries.

Own Id: OTP-6091

A problem with gethostbyname in erl_start.c could cause a buffer overflow. This has now been fixed.

Clean up of code and removed compiler warnings.

Own Id: OTP-7978

A faulty validation in ei_reg_getpval caused it to never return the key-value. This has now been fixed. (Thanks to Matt Stancliff)

Own Id: OTP-7960

Minor update to the configure script.

Own Id: OTP-7959

Minor update to the configure script.

Own Id: OTP-7959

Nodes belonging to different independent clusters can now co-exist on the same host with the help of a new environment variable setting ERL_EPMD_PORT.

Own Id: OTP-7826

A type-casting bug in ei_skip_term and ei_printterm on 64bit platforms rendering undefined results is now corrected.

Own Id: OTP-7577

A bug in the hostent copying code of erl_interface on MacOS X/Darwin is now corrected.

Own Id: OTP-7593

A problem with building erl_interface on FreeBSD has been fixed (Thanks to Akira Kitada).

Own Id: OTP-7611

Fixed bug in erl_interface when decoding broken data

Own Id: OTP-7448

An erroneous freeing of memory could occur when using ei_x_format_wo_ver in erl_interface, resulting in a segmentation fault.

Own Id: OTP-6795

A faulty compare in erl_marshal has now been fixed. (Thanks to Simon Cornish and Paul Mineiro)

Own Id: OTP-7368

Minor documentation fixes.

Own Id: OTP-7183 Aux Id: OTP-7118

The symbol __erl_errno was undefined in the single thread version of the ei library, but is now defined.

Own Id: OTP-6887

Corrected FreeBSD build error.

Own Id: OTP-7093

Calls to alloca in erl_marshal.c have been removed. A static buffer is now used instead to store node names temporarily.

Own Id: OTP-6331 Aux Id: seq10468

ei_print_term interprets a list of integers with values from 0 to 255 as a string. If the original list contains the integer 0, this is considered terminator of the string. This is incorrect. The function has now been modified to not look for '\0' in a string, but always print all characters.

Own Id: OTP-6339 Aux Id: seq10492

The combination of xeon processors with 64bit x86 extensions and a 32bit linux could cause ei_decode_long and ei_decode_longlong to fail for the value LONG_MIN and LONGLONG_MIN. The conversion is now made more portable.

Own Id: OTP-6216

Portability enhancements.

Own Id: OTP-6132

Different (and old) files in the and applications would cause build problems on the new Intel-based iMacs. (Thanks to Sebastion Strollo.)

Own Id: OTP-5967

pthread header and library mismatch on linux systems (at least some SuSE and Debian) with both NPTL and Linuxthreads libraries installed.

Own Id: OTP-5981

Support for a C node to connect to an Erlang node on a standalone host has been added.

Own Id: OTP-5883 Aux Id: seq10170

A configuration test error caused erl_interface to be built without support for threads. This has been corrected.

Own Id: OTP-5456

Changes and improvements have been made to the build and test environment to solve problems with failing erl_interface test cases.

Own Id: OTP-5295 Aux Id: OTP-5387

Process identifiers and port identifiers have been made more unique. Previously 18 bits were used as id in the internal representation of process and port identifiers. Now 28 bits are used.

The maximum limit on the number of concurrently existing processes due to the representation of pids has been increased to 268435456 processes. The same is true for ports. This limit will at least on a 32-bit architecture be impossible to reach due to memory shortage.

NOTE: By default, the , and the , , and libraries are now only guaranteed to be compatible with other Erlang/OTP components from the same release. It is possible to set each component in compatibility mode of an earlier release, though. See the documentation for respective component on how to set it in compatibility mode.

*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

Own Id: OTP-4968 Aux Id: OTP-4196

Corrections for mistakes done for patch erl_605/OTP-4874.

Own Id: OTP-4995 Aux Id: OTP-4874

A small optimization in ei_rpc*() was added and a bug in ei_decode_longlong() was corrected.

Own Id: OTP-4784

Strings longer than 65535 bytes were encoded wrong in ei/erl_interface.

Own Id: OTP-4865 Aux Id: EABln07451

erl_call -a parsed erlang terms incorrectly due to a bug in ei_format, which is now corrected.

Own Id: OTP-4777 Aux Id: seq8099