Re: [PATCH] kernel/sysctl.c: fix out of bounds access in fs.file-max

From: Matteo Croce
Date: Wed Apr 03 2019 - 12:40:45 EST


On Wed, Apr 3, 2019 at 5:51 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 03, 2019 at 05:24:26PM +0200, Matteo Croce wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 3, 2019 at 4:02 PM Christian Brauner <christian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Yeah, maybe but it still feels cleaner and more obvious to just add:
> > >
> > > static long long_zero;
> > >
> > > given that most callers actually seem to want an (unsigned) int.
> > >
> > > I don't have a strong opinion though so if others feel that it's just a
> > > waste of space consider it acked.
> > >
> >
> > Well, given that the value is zero, in this expectional case we could
> > avoid duplicating the symbol and save 4 bytes.
> > What the maintainers think?
>
> If we care about saving four bytes, we could just pass the address of
> ZERO_PAGE(0).

That would work, work too, maybe it's a bit overkill.
int zero is always there and it's static, so enlarging it to long
should be a straightforward fix.
Obviously we can't do it for other numbers, but we can alias it just
for the zero case..

Regards,

--
Matteo Croce
per aspera ad upstream