From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050920 Firefox/1.0.7

Description of problem:
If a bad buffer address is passed to time(2), rather than return (time_t)-1 and set errno to EFAULT, "-EFAULT" (-14) is returned directly to the caller.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
glibc-2.3.5-10.3

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Compile the following program:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    time_t tick;
    
    tick = time((time_t *)1);

    if (tick == (time_t)-1)
            perror("time");
    else
            printf("time() returned %d: %s", tick, ctime(&tick));

}

2. Run the program
  

Actual Results:  time() returned -14: Wed Dec 31 16:59:46 1969


Expected Results:  time: Bad address


Additional info:

This appears to be a long-standing bug in glibc where it apparently is not doing its normal "a negative return value from a syscall means a a failure with errno -return_value" processing, likely due to the fact that large negative values may be returned from the time syscall as time speeds away from the epoch.