Re: Buggy commit tracked to: "Re: [PATCH 2/9] iov_iter: move rw_copy_check_uvector() into lib/iov_iter.c"

Al Viro
2020-10-23T17:59:15Z

On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 03:09:30PM +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:

> Now, I am not a compiler expert, but as I already cited, at least on
> x86-64 clang expects that the high bits were cleared by the caller - in
> contrast to gcc. I suspect it's the same on arm64, but again, I am no
> compiler expert.
>
> If what I said and cites for x86-64 is correct, if the function expects
> an "unsigned int", it will happily use 64bit operations without further
> checks where valid when assuming high bits are zero. That's why even
> converting everything to "unsigned int" as proposed by me won't work on
> clang - it assumes high bits are zero (as indicated by Nick).
>
> As I am neither a compiler experts (did I mention that already? ;) ) nor
> an arm64 experts, I can't tell if this is a compiler BUG or not.

On arm64 when callee expects a 32bit argument, the caller is *not* responsible
for clearing the upper half of 64bit register used to pass the value - it only
needs to store the actual value into the lower half. The callee must consider
the contents of the upper half of that register as undefined. See AAPCS64 (e.g.
https://github.com/ARM-software/abi-aa/blob/master/aapcs64/aapcs64.rst#parameter-passing-rules
); AFAICS, the relevant bit is
"Unlike in the 32-bit AAPCS, named integral values must be narrowed by
the callee rather than the caller."