Re: [PATCH] SCSI: sanitize INQUIRY strings

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 02:11:32PM -0400, Philip R. Auld wrote:
> As far as I can tell Alan is not trying to "ascertain the intention"
> of the firmware engineer, drug-crazed or otherwise. He is making sure
> that the array of bytes is printable. You, I think, are trying to
> get him to interepret the out-of-spec values. I think that's a
> mistake. It's not a string so NUL byte termination does not 
> apply. It's an array of what should be printable characters 
> of the specified length.

The device is out of spec.  The question is how to handle it.  Alan
thinks that a NUL should be treated as a space.  I think that a NUL
indicates the engineer didn't read the spec and intended the string to
stop there, probably padding with garbage.

Let's take the case of a fictional device that has a vendor string

TJD\0Hje9

I say that should be printed as "TJD     ".  You say that should be
printed as "TJD Hje9".