[PATCH v2 2/2] SUNRPC: Document validity guarantees of the pointer returned by reserve_space

cel
2024-12-23T18:07:36Z

From: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>

A subtlety of this API is that if the @nbytes region traverses a
page boundary, the next __xdr_commit_encode will shift the data item
in the XDR encode buffer. This makes the returned pointer point to
something else, leading to unexpected behavior.

There are a few cases where the caller saves the returned pointer
and then later uses it to insert a computed value into an earlier
part of the stream. This can be safe only if either:

- the data item is guaranteed to be in the XDR buffer's head, and
thus is not ever going to be near a page boundary, or
- the data item is no larger than 4 octets, since XDR alignment
rules require all data items to start on 4-octet boundaries

But that safety is only an artifact of the current implementation.
It would be less brittle if these "safe" uses were eventually
replaced.

Signed-off-by: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
---
net/sunrpc/xdr.c | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/net/sunrpc/xdr.c b/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
index 62e07c330a66..f198bb043e2f 100644
--- a/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
+++ b/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
@@ -1097,6 +1097,9 @@ static noinline __be32 *xdr_get_next_encode_buffer(struct xdr_stream *xdr,
* Checks that we have enough buffer space to encode 'nbytes' more
* bytes of data. If so, update the total xdr_buf length, and
* adjust the length of the current kvec.
+ *
+ * The returned pointer is valid only until the next call to
+ * xdr_reserve_space() or xdr_commit_encode() on this stream.
*/
__be32 * xdr_reserve_space(struct xdr_stream *xdr, size_t nbytes)
{
--
2.47.0