On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 07:54:45PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > kernelci.org reports a new compile warning for old code in the pmcraid > driver: > > arch/mips/include/asm/uaccess.h:138:21: warning: passing argument 1 of '__access_ok' makes pointer from integer without a cast [-Wint-conversion] > > The warning got introduced by a cleanup to the access_ok() helper > that requires the argument to be a pointer, where the old version > silently accepts 'unsigned long' arguments as it still does on most > other architectures. > > The new behavior in MIPS however seems absolutely sensible, and so far I > could only find one other file with the same issue, so the best solution > seems to be to clean up the pmcraid driver. > > This makes the driver consistently use 'void __iomem *' pointers for > passing around the address of the user space ioctl arguments, which gets > rid of the kernelci warning as well as several sparse warnings. Is there any point in keeping that access_ok() in the first place, rather than just switching to copy_from_user()/copy_to_user() in there? AFAICS, it's only for the sake of the loop in pmcraid_copy_sglist(): for (i = 0; i < (len / bsize_elem); i++, buffer += bsize_elem) { struct page *page = sg_page(&scatterlist[i]); kaddr = kmap(page); if (direction == DMA_TO_DEVICE) rc = __copy_from_user(kaddr, (void *)buffer, bsize_elem); else rc = __copy_to_user((void *)buffer, kaddr, bsize_elem); kunmap(page); if (rc) { pmcraid_err("failed to copy user data into sg list\n"); return -EFAULT; } scatterlist[i].length = bsize_elem; } and seeing that each of those calls copies is at least a full page... If there is an architecture where a single access_ok() costs a noticable fraction of the time it takes to copy a full page, we have a much worse problem than overhead in obscure ioctl...