Re: [PATCH v12 01/12] lib: introduce copy_struct_{to,from}_user helpers

Christian Brauner
2019-09-06T07:00:49Z

On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 05:56:18AM +1000, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
> On 2019-09-05, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 08:23:03PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> >
> > > Because every caller of that function right now has that limit set
> > > anyway iirc. So we can either remove it from here and place it back for
> > > the individual callers or leave it in the helper.
> > > Also, I'm really asking, why not? Is it unreasonable to have an upper
> > > bound on the size (for a long time probably) or are you disagreeing with
> > > PAGE_SIZE being used? PAGE_SIZE limit is currently used by sched, perf,
> > > bpf, and clone3 and in a few other places.
> >
> > For a primitive that can be safely used with any size (OK, any within
> > the usual 2Gb limit)? Why push the random policy into the place where
> > it doesn't belong?
> >
> > Seriously, what's the point? If they want to have a large chunk of
> > userland memory zeroed or checked for non-zeroes - why would that
> > be a problem?
>
> Thinking about it some more, there isn't really any r/w amplification --
> so there isn't much to gain by passing giant structs. Though, if we are
> going to permit 2GB buffers, isn't that also an argument to use
> memchr_inv()? :P

I think we should just do a really dumb, easy to understand minimal
thing for now. It could even just be what every caller is doing right
now anyway with the get_user() loop.
The only way to settle memchr_inv() vs all the other clever ways
suggested here is to benchmark it and see if it matters *for the current
users* of this helper. If it does, great we can do it. If it doesn't why
bother having that argument right now?
Once we somehow end up in a possible world where we apparently have
decided it's a great idea to copy 2GB argument structures for a syscall
into or from the kernel we can start optimizing the hell out of this.
Before that and especially with current callers I honestly doubt it
matters whether we use memchr_inv() or while() {get_user()} loops.

Christian