f5a1a536fa
A common pattern for syscall extensions is increasing the size of a
struct passed from userspace, such that the zero-value of the new fields
result in the old kernel behaviour (allowing for a mix of userspace and
kernel vintages to operate on one another in most cases).
While this interface exists for communication in both directions, only
one interface is straightforward to have reasonable semantics for
(userspace passing a struct to the kernel). For kernel returns to
userspace, what the correct semantics are (whether there should be an
error if userspace is unaware of a new extension) is very
syscall-dependent and thus probably cannot be unified between syscalls
(a good example of this problem is [1]).
Previously there was no common lib/ function that implemented
the necessary extension-checking semantics (and different syscalls
implemented them slightly differently or incompletely[2]). Future
patches replace common uses of this pattern to make use of
copy_struct_from_user().
Some in-kernel selftests that insure that the handling of alignment and
various byte patterns are all handled identically to memchr_inv() usage.
[1]: commit 1251201c0d34 ("sched/core: Fix uclamp ABI bug, clean up and
robustify sched_read_attr() ABI logic and code")
[2]: For instance {sched_setattr,perf_event_open,clone3}(2) all do do
similar checks to copy_struct_from_user() while rt_sigprocmask(2)
always rejects differently-sized struct arguments.
Suggested-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20191001011055.19283-2-cyphar@cyphar.com
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.