Re: AUDIT: copy_from_user is a deathtrap.

Roman Zippel
2002-05-19T19:58:27Z

Hi,

On Sun, 19 May 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> A faulting write will fill some subsequent memory area with zeroes, but a
> subsequent write can complete the original one.
>
> It has to _commit_ the whole area, because it uses the pre-fault size
> information to optimize away reads etc, ie if you do a
>
> write(fd, buf, 4096);
>
> at a page-aligned offset, the write code knows that it shouldn't read the
> old contents because they get overwritten.
>
> Which is why we need to commit the whole 4096 bytes, even if we only
> actually were able to get a single byte from user space.

I basically agree, but I think there is a special case: writing at the end
of the file. Instead of writing zeros, we have to truncate the file,
otherwise you can't restart append writes. Currently we get this wrong.

bye, Roman