linux/arch
Linus Torvalds 42a886af72 x86-64: Fix "bytes left to copy" return value for copy_from_user()
Most users by far do not care about the exact return value (they only
really care about whether the copy succeeded in its entirety or not),
but a few special core routines actually care deeply about exactly how
many bytes were copied from user space.

And the unrolled versions of the x86-64 user copy routines would
sometimes report that it had copied more bytes than it actually had.

Very few uses actually have partial copies to begin with, but to make
this bug even harder to trigger, most x86 CPU's use the "rep string"
instructions for normal user copies, and that version didn't have this
issue.

To make it even harder to hit, the one user of this that really cared
about the return value (and used the uncached version of the copy that
doesn't use the "rep string" instructions) was the generic write
routine, which pre-populated its source, once more hiding the problem by
avoiding the exception case that triggers the bug.

In other words, very special thanks to Bron Gondwana who not only
triggered this, but created a test-program to show it, and bisected the
behavior down to commit 08291429cf ("mm:
fix pagecache write deadlocks") which changed the access pattern just
enough that you can now trigger it with 'writev()' with multiple
iovec's.

That commit itself was not the cause of the bug, it just allowed all the
stars to align just right that you could trigger the problem.

[ Side note: this is just the minimal fix to make the copy routines
  (with __copy_from_user_inatomic_nocache as the particular version that
  was involved in showing this) have the right return values.

  We really should improve on the exceptional case further - to make the
  copy do a byte-accurate copy up to the exact page limit that causes it
  to fail.  As it is, the callers have to do extra work to handle the
  limit case gracefully. ]

Reported-by: Bron Gondwana <brong@fastmail.fm>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

 (which didn't have this problem), and since
most users that do the carethis was very hard to trigger, but
2008-06-17 17:47:50 -07:00
..
alpha [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
arm [ARM] 5077/1: spi: fix list scan success verification in PXA ssp driver 2008-06-11 23:38:46 +01:00
avr32 avr32: Fix cpufreq oops when ondemand governor is default 2008-05-27 09:37:42 +02:00
blackfin Blackfin arch: protect only the SPI bus controller with CONFIG_SPI_BFIN 2008-06-07 15:03:01 +08:00
cris [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
frv Fix various old email addresses for dwmw2 2008-06-06 11:29:10 -07:00
h8300 [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
ia64 Merge branch 'release' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/aegl/linux-2.6 2008-06-16 11:52:43 -07:00
m32r [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
m68k m68k: enable CONFIG_COMPAT_BRK by default 2008-06-06 11:29:09 -07:00
m68knommu m68knommu: init coldfire timer TRR with n - 1, not n 2008-06-12 18:05:40 -07:00
mips [MIPS] Au1200: MMC resource size off by one 2008-06-16 15:14:49 +01:00
mn10300 MN10300: Kill linux/a.out.h inclusions 2008-06-16 10:20:57 -07:00
parisc parisc: fix off by one in setup_sigcontext32 2008-06-13 10:49:55 -04:00
powerpc [POWERPC] Turn on ATA_SFF so we get SATA_SVW back in defconfigs 2008-06-16 21:14:12 +10:00
ppc [POWERPC] Export empty_zero_page and copy_page in arch/ppc 2008-05-31 17:08:28 +10:00
s390 Merge branch 'kvm-updates-2.6.26' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/avi/kvm 2008-06-11 10:35:44 -07:00
sh sh: Add -mno-fdpic to default flags. 2008-06-09 16:49:43 +09:00
sparc sparc: switch /proc/led to seq_file 2008-06-03 15:21:21 -07:00
sparc64 sparc64: Prevent stack backtrace false positives on trap frames. 2008-05-21 21:50:01 -07:00
um uml: work around broken host PTRACE_SYSEMU 2008-06-12 18:05:40 -07:00
v850 [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
x86 x86-64: Fix "bytes left to copy" return value for copy_from_user() 2008-06-17 17:47:50 -07:00
xtensa [PATCH] take init_files to fs/file.c 2008-05-16 17:22:20 -04:00
.gitignore
Kconfig dma: add dma_*map*_attrs() interfaces 2008-04-29 08:06:11 -07:00