Re: the nul-terminated string helper desk chair rearrangement

Christoph Hellwig
2023-10-26T10:01:55Z

On Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 11:30:49AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> I'm curious where you looked and didn't find documentation -- perhaps
> there is an improvement to be made to aim one to where the existing
> documentation lives?

My order was the following:

- look for kernel doc on the main function implementation in
lib/string.c (as found by a grep for an EXPORT_SYMBOL for it)
- after not finding it there, but seeing that it has an ifdef for
an arch override, which turns out to be unused
- then I grepped the Documentation/ directory for it, and while
there are quite a few matches for strscpy, they are largely
in examples, with the only text referring to strscpy being
Documentation/process/deprecated.rst that tells you to use it
instead of strcpy, but not how it actually works
- after that I realized that some people put the kerneldoc on
the declaration, so I looked at that in string.h, but couldn't
find it.

> > There's some docs at [1]. Perhaps there could be more?
> >
> > [1]: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.6-rc6/source/include/linux/fortify-string.h#L292
>
> Right, And it's even valid kern-doc, which gets rendered in the kernel
> API docs, along with all the other string functions:
> https://docs.kernel.org/core-api/kernel-api.html#c.strscpy

Well, I never use the generated kerneldoc because it's much harder than
just grepping the tree, but indeed it exists even if it's hidden in
the most obsfucated way. But at least I know now!