Most of Tor’s utility code is in modules in the src/common subdirectory.
These are divided, broadly, into compatibility functions, utility functions, containers, and cryptography. (Someday in the future, it would be great to split these modules into separate directories. Also, some functions are probably put in the wrong modules)
These functions live in src/common/compat*.c; some corresponding macros live in src/common/compat*.h. They serve as wrappers around platform-specific or compiler-specific logic functionality.
In general, the rest of the Tor code should not be calling platform-specific or otherwise non-portable functions. Instead, they should call wrappers from compat.c, which implement a common cross-platform API. (If you don’t know whether a function is portable, it’s usually good enough to see whether it exists on OSX, Linux, and Windows.)
Other compatibility modules include backtrace.c, which generates stack traces for crash reporting; sandbox.c, which implements the Linux seccomp2 sandbox; and procmon.c, which handles monitoring a child process.
Parts of address.c are compatibility code for handling network addressing issues; other parts are in util.c.
Notable compatibility areas are:
mmap support for mapping files into the address space (read-only)
Code to work around the intricacies
Workaround code for Windows’s horrible winsock incompatibilities and Linux’s intricate socket extensions.
Helpful string functions like memmem, memstr, asprintf, strlcpy, and strlcat that not all platforms have.
Locale-ignoring variants of the ctypes functions.
Time-manipulation functions
File locking function
IPv6 functions for platforms that don’t have enough IPv6 support
Endianness functions
OS functions
Threading and locking functions.
=== Utility functions
General-purpose utilities are in util.c; they include higher-level wrappers around many of the compatibility functions to provide things like file-at-once access, memory management functions, math, string manipulation, time manipulation, filesystem manipulation, etc.
(Some functionality, like daemon-launching, would be better off in a compatibility module.)
In util_format.c, we have code to implement stuff like base-32 and base-64 encoding.
The address.c module interfaces with the system resolver and implements address parsing and formatting functions. It converts sockaddrs to and from a more compact tor_addr_t type.
The di_ops.c module provides constant-time comparison and associative-array operations, for side-channel avoidance.
The logging subsystem in log.c supports logging to files, to controllers, to stdout/stderr, or to the system log.
The abstraction in memarea.c is used in cases when a large amount of temporary objects need to be allocated, and they can all be freed at the same time.
The torgzip.c module wraps the zlib library to implement compression.
Workqueue.c provides a simple multithreaded work-queue implementation.
The container.c module defines these container types, used throughout the Tor codebase.
There is a dynamic array called smartlist, used as our general resizeable array type. It supports sorting, searching, common set operations, and so on. It has specialized functions for smartlists of strings, and for heap-based priority queues.
There’s a bit-array type.
A set of mapping types to map strings, 160-bit digests, and 256-bit digests to void *. These are what we generally use when we want O(1) lookup.
Additionally, for containers, we use the ht.h and tor_queue.h headers, in src/ext. These provide intrusive hashtable and linked-list macros.
Once, we tried to keep our cryptography code in a single “crypto.c” file, with an “aes.c” module containing an AES implementation for use with older OpenSSLs.
Now, our practice has become to introduce crypto_*.c modules when adding new cryptography backend code. We have modules for Ed25519, Curve25519, secret-to-key algorithms, and password-based boxed encryption.
Our various TLS compatibility code, wrappers, and hacks are kept in tortls.c, which is probably too full of Tor-specific kludges. I’m hoping we can eliminate most of those kludges when we finally remove support for older versions of our TLS handshake.