PROBLEM: Firmware loader fallback mechanism no longer works with sendfile

Siddharth Gupta
2021-01-04T22:44:54Z

Hi all,

With the introduction of the filesystem change "fs: don't allow splice
read/write without explicit ops"[1] the fallback mechanism of the
firmware loader[2] no longer works when using sendfile[3] from the
userspace.

Since the binary attributes don't support splice_{read,write} functions
the calls to splice_{read,write} used the default kernel_{read,write}
functions. With the above change this results in an -EINVAL return from
do_splice_from[4].

This essentially means that sendfile will not work for any binary
attribute in the sysfs.

Thanks,
Siddharth

[1]:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/36e2c7421f02a22f71c9283e55fdb672a9eb58e7#diff-70c49af2ed5805fc1406ed6e6532d6a029ada1abd90cca6442711b9cecd4d523
[2]:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/base/firmware_loader/main.c#L831
[3]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/read_write.c#L1257
[4]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/splice.c#L753