On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 05:27:08PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, 27 Jan 2025 at 17:21, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Umm... On some architectures it does, but mostly that's the ones > > where unaligned word loads are costly. Which target do you have > > in mind? > > I was more thinking that we could just make the fallback case be a 'memcmp()'. > > It's not like this particular place matters - as you say, that > byte-at-a-time code is only used on architectures that don't enable > the dcache word-at-a-time code (that requires the special "do loads > that can fault" zeropad helper), but we've had some other places where > we'd worry about the string length. > > Look at d_path() for another example. That copy_from_kernel_nofault() > in prepend_copy()... Hmm... So something like /* * Returns a pointer to name and a length; length might be * inaccurate in case of race with dentry renaming, but * it will not exceed the distance from returned pointer * to the end of containing object. * Caller MUST hold rcu_read_lock(). * Caller MUST NOT expect the contents of name to remain * stable - it can change at any time. */ const char *__d_name_rcu(struct dentry *dentry, int *p) { const char *name = smp_load_acquire(&dentry->d_name.name); if (unlikely(name != &dentry->d_shortname.string)) *p = container_of(name, struct external_name, name)->len; else if (unlikely((*p = dentry->d_name.name) >= DNAME_INLINE_LEN) *p = DNAME_INLINE_LEN - 1; return name; } with very limited accessibility (basically, dcache.c and d_path.c) prepend_name() might be able to use that...