Re: [PATCH 1/5] string.h: add array-wrappers for (v)memdup_user()

[Philipp Stanner]

On Wed, 2023-08-30 at 17:11 +0300, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 4:46 PM Philipp Stanner <pstanner@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > 
> > Currently, user array duplications are sometimes done without an
> > overflow check. Sometimes the checks are done manually; sometimes
> > the
> > array size is calculated with array_size() and sometimes by
> > calculating
> > n * size directly in code.
> > 
> > Introduce wrappers for arrays for memdup_user() and vmemdup_user()
> > to
> > provide a standardized and safe way for duplicating user arrays.
> > 
> > This is both for new code as well as replacing usage of
> > (v)memdup_user()
> > in existing code that uses, e.g., n * size to calculate array
> > sizes.
> 
> ...
> 
> > --- a/include/linux/string.h
> > +++ b/include/linux/string.h
> 
> I'm wondering if this has no side-effects as string.h/string.c IIRC
> is
> used also for early stages where some of the APIs are not available.
> 

I forgot to address this point in my previous reply.

Who's going to decide whether this is a problem or not?


My personal guess is that this is unlikely to be a problem because

   A. either (v)memdup_user() is available, in which case
      (v)memdup_array_user() will always work – 
   B. or (v)memdup_user() is not available, which would cause the code
      that currently uses (v)memdup_user() for copying arrays to fail
      anyways.


P.