Re: [PATCH 1/4] pkeys: add API to switch to permissive pkey register

[Dmitry Vyukov]

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 at 17:15, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 2/24/25 05:25, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> >>> +#ifndef CONFIG_ARCH_HAS_PERMISSIVE_PKEY
> >>> +
> >>> +/*
> >>> + * Common name for value of the register that controls access to PKEYs
> >>> + * (called differently on different arches: PKRU, POR, AMR).
> >>> + */
> >>> +typedef int pkey_reg_t;
> >> Tiny nit: Should this be an unsigned type?
> >>
> >> Nobody should be manipulating it, but I'd be surprised if any of the
> >> architectures have a signed type for it.
> > Since this is a stub type, can matching the real types do any good
> > besides masking programming errors?
> > I've changed it to char in v4 to surface more potential programming errors.
>
> I was more worried about copy-and-paste.
>
> I agree that 'char' is the most fragile, but it's going to fragile in
> subtle ways and I'm not sure subtly broken code (whether it's expected
> to be compiled in or not) is great to have in a code base.
>
> Do we have any types in sparse that would be appropriate? Could we mark
> the pkey_reg_t as being in a different address space when pkeys is
> compiled out so that sparse knows not to let it interact with other types?

We could typedef it to some fake struct. Such a struct can't be passed
to any function accepting an integer type (real pkeys), and any
arithmetic won't work on it.