Re: [PATCH] x86: uaccess: fix regression in unsafe_get_user

From: Al Viro
Date: Sat Feb 16 2019 - 19:12:03 EST


On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 11:47:02PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 02:50:15PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>
> > What is the actual problem? Weâre not actually demand-faulting this data, are we? Are we just overrunning the buffer because the from_user helpers are too clever? Can we fix it for real by having the fancy helpers do *aligned* loads so that they donât overrun the buffer? Heck, this might be faster, too.
>
> Unaligned _stores_ are not any cheaper, and you'd get one hell of
> extra arithmetics from trying to avoid both. Check something
> like e.g. memcpy() on alpha, where you really have to keep all
> accesses aligned, both on load and on store side.
>
> Can't we just pad the buffers a bit? Making sure that name_buf
> and symlink_buf are _not_ followed by unmapped pages shouldn't
> be hard. Both are allocated by kmalloc(), so...
>
> What am I missing here?

... the fact that read_info() might skip copying if everything it
wants is already in the buffer passed by decompressor ;-/ It's
been a while since I looked into that code...