On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 02:56:28PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 2:47 PM Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 12:01:54PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > > I don't mind it, but some of those buffers are big, and the generic > > > code generally doesn't know how big. > > > > That's what regset_size() returns... > > Yes, but the code ends up being disgusting. You first have to call > that indirect function just to get the size, then do a kmalloc, and > then call another indirect function to actually fill it. Umm... You do realize that this indirect function is a pathological case, right? It has exactly one user - REGSET_SVE on arm64. Everything else uses regset->n * regset->size. > Don't do that. Not since we know how retpoline is a bad thing. > > And since the size isn't always some trivial constant (ie for x86 PFU > it depends on the register state!), I think the only sane model is to > change the interface even more, and just have the "get()" function not > only get the data, but allocate the backing store too. > > So you'd never pass in the result pointer - you'd get a result area > that you can then free. > > Hmm? Do you want such allocations done in each ->get() instance? We have a plenty of those instances... > > FWIW, what I have in mind is to start with making copy_regset_to_user() do > > buf = kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL); > > if (!buf) > > return -ENOMEM; > > err = regset->get(target, regset, offset, size, buf, NULL); > > See above. This doesn't work. You don't know the size. And we don't > have a known maximum size either. We do know that caller does not want more than the value it has passed in 'size' argument, though. For existing ptrace requests it's either min(iov->iov_len, regset->n * regset->size) (in ptrace_regset()) or an explicit constant (usually in arch_ptrace()). Note, BTW, that regset_size() is used only by coredump - that's how much we allocate there. Everybody else either looks like case PTRACE_GETFPREGS: /* Get the child FPU state. */ return copy_regset_to_user(child, task_user_regset_view(current), REGSET_FP, 0, sizeof(struct user_i387_struct), datap); or does regset->n * regset->size. FWIW, the real need to know the size is not in "how much do we allocated" - it's "how much do we copy"; I _think_ everyone except that arm64 thing fills exactly regset->n * regset->size (or we have a nasty infoleak in coredumps) and we can switch coredump to "allocate regset->n * regset->size, call ->get(), copy all of that into coredump unless ->get_size is there, copy ->get_size() bytes to coredump if ->get_size exists" as the first step. Longer term I would have ->get() tell how much has it filled and killed ->get_size(). Again, there's only one user. But I'd prefer to do that in the end of series, when the bodies of ->get() instances are cleaned up...