Re: [RFC][CFT][PATCHSET v1] uaccess unification

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 01:37:30PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 1:29 PM, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > BTW, I wonder if inlining all of the copy_{to,from}_user() is actually a win.
> 
> I would suggest against it.
> 
> The only part I think is worth inlining is the compile time size
> checks for kasan - and that only because of the obvious "sizes are
> constant only when inlining" issue.
> 
> We used to inline a *lot* of user accesses historically, pretty much
> all of them were bogus.
> 
> The only ones that really want inlining are the non-checking ones that
> people should never use directly, but that are just helper things used
> by other routines (ie the "unsafe_copy_from_user()" kind of things
> that are designed for strncpy_from_user()).
> 
> Once you start checking access ranges, and have might_fault debugging
> etc, it shouldn't be inlined.

FWIW, that's why I'd put those knobs (INLINE_COPY_{TO,FROM}_USER) in there;
if for some architectures making those inlined is really a win, they can
request the inlining; for now I'd mostly set them to match what architectures
had been doing, but I also strongly suspect that in a lot of cases that
inlining is counterproductive.  Building it both ways is simply a matter of
deleting those two lines in asm/uaccess.h in question, and if testing
shows that out-of-line works better on given architecture, well... 

I would expect that the final variant will have those remain only on a few
architectures.  IMO decision whether to inline them or not is up to
architecture - it's not as if having the possibility to inline them
would really complicate the generic side of things...