Re: systemd-rfkill regression on 5.11 and later kernels

From: Johannes Berg
Date: Thu Mar 18 2021 - 05:37:04 EST


Hi Takashi,

Oh yay :-(

> we've received a bug report about rfkill change that was introduced in
> 5.11. While the systemd-rfkill expects the same size of both read and
> write, the kernel rfkill write cuts off to the old 8 bytes while read
> gives 9 bytes, hence it leads the error:
>   https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/18677
>   https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1183147

> As far as I understand from the log in the commit 14486c82612a, this
> sounds like the intended behavior.

Not really? I don't even understand why we get this behaviour.

The code is this:

rfkill_fop_write():

...
/* we don't need the 'hard' variable but accept it */
if (count < RFKILL_EVENT_SIZE_V1 - 1)
return -EINVAL;

# this is actually 7 - RFKILL_EVENT_SIZE_V1 is 8
# (and obviously we get past this if and don't get -EINVAL

/*
* Copy as much data as we can accept into our 'ev' buffer,
* but tell userspace how much we've copied so it can determine
* our API version even in a write() call, if it cares.
*/
count = min(count, sizeof(ev));

# sizeof(ev) should be 9 since 'ev' is the new struct

if (copy_from_user(&ev, buf, count))
return -EFAULT;

...
ret = 0;
...
return ret ?: count;




Ah, no, I see. The bug says:

EDIT: above is with kernel-core-5.10.16-200.fc33.x86_64.

So you've recompiled systemd with 5.11 headers, but are running against
5.10 now, where the short write really was intentional - it lets you
detect that the new fields weren't handled by the kernel. If


The other issue is basically this (pre-fix) systemd code:

l = read(c.rfkill_fd, &event, sizeof(event));
...
if (l != RFKILL_EVENT_SIZE_V1) /* log/return error */



So ... honestly, I don't have all that much sympathy, when the uapi
header explicitly says we want to be able to change the size. But I
guess "no regressions" rules are hard, so ... dunno. I guess we can add
a version/size ioctl and keep using 8 bytes unless you send that?

johannes