Re: [PATCH 5/5] powerpc: Implement masked user access

Linus Torvalds
2025-06-22T17:48:14Z

On Sun, 22 Jun 2025 at 10:13, David Laight <david.laight.linux@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Not checking the size is slightly orthogonal.
> It really just depends on the accesses being 'reasonably sequential'.
> That is probably always true since access_ok() covers a single copy.

It is probably true in practice, but yeah, it's worth thinking about.
Particularly for various user level structure accesses, we do end up
often accessing the members individually and thus potentially out of
order, but as you say "reasonable sequential" is still true: the
accesses are within a reasonably small offset of each other.

And when we have potentially very big accesses with large offsets from
the beginning (ie things like read/write() calls), we do them
sequentially.

There *might* be odd ioctls and such that get offsets from user space,
though. So any conversion to using 'masked_user_access_begin()' needs
to have at least *some* thought and not be just a mindless conversion
from access_ok().

We have this same issue in access_ok() itself, and on x86-64 that does

static inline bool __access_ok(const void __user *ptr, unsigned long size)
{
if (__builtin_constant_p(size <= PAGE_SIZE) && size <= PAGE_SIZE) {
return valid_user_address(ptr);
.. do the more careful one that actually uses the 'size' ...

so it turns access_ok() itself into just a simple single-ended
comparison with the starting address for small sizes, because we know
it's ok to overflow by a bit (because of how valid_user_address()
works on x86).

Linus