Re: [PATCH 3.12 69/76] net: fix infoleak in rtnetlink

[Vegard Nossum]

On 20 May 2016 at 16:35, Kangjie Lu <kangjielu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > Yes or no.  According to my experiences, it depends on how
>> > it is initialized:
>> > if there are no variables but all constants in the bracket,
>> > a global initializer will be generated, which will zero the remaining
>> > bytes
>> > including padding; otherwise, no global initializer
>> > will be used, hence the remaining bytes are not initialized.
>> > In this case, dev is not a constant, so no global initializer
>> > will be used to initialize the padding bytes
>>
>> I did some experiements with gcc and my observations are:
>>
>> 1. it doesn't depend on whether the initializer is constant or variable,
>> but...
>
>
> My observation is based on LLVM. Could you also double check the LLVM case?

With clang-3.5 from Ubuntu and -O2 I'm seeing the same as you: with
only constants it zeroes the padding, with variables it doesn't.

>>
>> 2. whether or not padding gets initialized depends on *which fields*
>> you're initializing (I assume this has to do with what instructions it
>> ends up using, as it might be faster to do a 32-bit mov on x86 instead
>> of an 8-bit one if you're initializing an 8-bit field which is
>> followed by 24 bits of padding, for example).

Vegard