Re: [PATCH] mm: __nr_to_section - make it safe against overflow v2

["Pekka Enberg" <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>]

Hi Andrew,

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jan 2009 13:31:32 +0300
> Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> __nr_to_section should check for array bound overflow.
>> We should better get NULL dereference then silently
>> pass some memory snippet out of bounds to a caller.
>>
>
> Are there actually any known problems here?
>
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
>> ---
>>  include/linux/mmzone.h |   15 +++++++++++++--
>>  1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>>
>> Index: linux-2.6.git/include/linux/mmzone.h
>> ===================================================================
>> --- linux-2.6.git.orig/include/linux/mmzone.h
>> +++ linux-2.6.git/include/linux/mmzone.h
>> @@ -935,6 +935,12 @@ static inline unsigned long early_pfn_to
>>
>>  struct page;
>>  struct page_cgroup;
>> +
>> +/*
>> + * NOTE: sizeof(struct mem_section) _must_ be power of 2
>> + * otherwise SECTION_ROOT_MASK will be broken so be
>> + * really cautious while modifying this structure
>> + */
>>  struct mem_section {
>>       /*
>>        * This is, logically, a pointer to an array of struct
>> @@ -980,9 +986,14 @@ extern struct mem_section mem_section[NR
>>
>>  static inline struct mem_section *__nr_to_section(unsigned long nr)
>>  {
>> -     if (!mem_section[SECTION_NR_TO_ROOT(nr)])
>> +     unsigned long idx = SECTION_NR_TO_ROOT(nr);
>> +
>> +     if (WARN_ON(idx >= NR_SECTION_ROOTS))
>> +             return NULL;
>> +
>> +     if (!mem_section[idx])
>>               return NULL;
>> -     return &mem_section[SECTION_NR_TO_ROOT(nr)][nr & SECTION_ROOT_MASK];
>> +     return &mem_section[idx][nr & SECTION_ROOT_MASK];
>>  }
>
> The patch adds nearly 300 bytes of stuff to mm/sparse.o, and for what??

I was thinking of things like commit
bead9a3abd15710b0bdfd418daef606722d86282 ("mm: sparsemem
memory_present() fix") and such but missed the fact that
__nr_to_section() inlined all over the place. So yeah, it's not worth
it.

                                            Pekka