Re: [PATCH] zram: fix bug storing backing_dev

Sergey Senozhatsky
2018-08-16T01:48:50Z

On (08/14/18 16:45), Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > > - strlcpy(file_name, buf, len);
> >
> > This is quite interesting. The reason it worked before was the fact that
> > strlcpy() copies 'len - 1' bytes, which is strlen(buf) - 1 in our case,
> > so it accidentally didn't copy the trailing new line symbol. Which also
> > means that "echo -n /dev/sdX" most likely was broken.
> >
>
> I can't find the original email on lkml for some reason, but I
> recreated the patch.

Neither can I.

> The changelog doesn't describe the end-user impact of the bug, which is
> very desirable when tagging a patch for -stable backporting. Can we
> have that paragraph please?

The problem is that strlcpy() copies as many bytes as the source string
has, not as many bytes as destination string can fit.

IOW:

char dst[100];
char src[1000];
...
strlcpy(dst, src, strlen(src));

where it should do

strlcpy(dst, src, strlen(dst));

> The implementation might be able to use strim() somehow.

strim() trims white-spaces. What we have here is a trailing new line symbol,
which echo appends to the string it writes to the kernel [echo -n switch
disables it]. So we receive a "/dev/name\n" device name from sysfs, which we
unsuccessfully try to open(). To make it all work we need to remove that
trailing new line.

A side note,
There is sysfs_strcmp(), which takes care of that "user space may append
a new line to the string" case, I wonder if we should finally have
sysfs_strcpy(), which would not copy the trailing new line. I think this
"if string[sz - 1] == '\n' then string[sz - 1] == 0x00" is quite common.

-ss