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This is a resend of a pair of patches that didn't get a lot of attention last time. I've cleaned up the second one a bit, as it had some ugliness that might have put some people off... The problem is that when we write to a file, the copy from userspace to pagecache is first done with preemption disabled, so if the source address is not immediately available the copy fails *and* *zeros* *the* *destination*. This is a problem because a concurrent read (which admittedly is an odd thing to do) might see zeros rather that was there before the write, or what was there after, or some mixture of the two (any of these being a reasonable thing to see). If the copy did fail, it will immediately be retried with preemption re-enabled so any transient problem with accessing the source won't cause an error. The first copying does not need to zero any uncopied bytes, and doing so causes the problem. It uses copy_from_user_atomic rather than copy_from_user so the simple expedient is to change copy_from_user_atomic to *not* zero out bytes on failure. The first of these two patches prepares for the change by fixing two places which assume copy_from_user_atomic does zero the tail. The two usages are very similar pieces of code which copy from a userspace iovec into one or more page-cache pages. These are changed to remove the assumption. The second patch changes __copy_from_user_inatomic* to not zero the tail. Once these are accepted, I will look at similar patches of other architectures where this is important (ppc, mips and sparc being the ones I can find). Feedback very welcome. Thanks. NeilBrown [PATCH 001 of 2] Prepare for __copy_from_user_inatomic to not zero missed bytes. [PATCH 002 of 2] Make copy_from_user_inatomic NOT zero the tail on i386 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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