Re: status of constification

[Kees Cook <kees.cook@canonical.com>]

Hi Emese,

I got distracted, but I'd like to get back to this thread...

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 10:37:41PM +0100, Emese Revfy wrote:
> I will gladly break up my current patch for the next -rc by structure
> type or maintainer (some preferred it one way or the other) and send
> it in some time next week so that you can handle the upstream submission
> process (I will continue to maintain my patch in grsecurity).
> 
> There are many structures that can be constified, you can use the following
> command to find most of them (use it on an allyesconfig kernel preferably):
> 
> grep _ops System.map |grep -Ewi 'b|d' | awk '{print $3}' | \
> while read i ; do cscope -d -L -1 $i | grep -E "struct[ \t]*([^ ]*)[ \t]*" \
> --color=none -o | awk '{print $2}' ; done |sort -u
> 
> Also there are always new instances of structures going in that should have
> been constified.

Just in my running kernel, I see 56 _ops structures reported from the above
search. :)

Do you have a new stack of patches I can help usher into the kernel? I
don't want reinvent the wheel if I don't have to. :)

> I tried to automate the whole process with Coccinelle but I abandoned it
> because Coccinelle didn't support recursive header file inclusion at the time.
> If someone feels like fixing Coccinelle then I would quickly finish my script
> (it has a few bugs because I could never test it for real), but see the end
> of the mail for the current version. I think it would be a good idea because
> it would take a few hours only to generate a constification patch for a new
> kernel. One thing that probably cannot be automated with Coccinelle is that
> once the script determines that a given structure cannot be constified, it
> cannot undo already emitted patches for the given structure so it must be
> cleaned up by post processing script.

Has there been any update to your Coccinelle script since the addition of
-recursive_includes?

Thanks!

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Ubuntu Security Team