Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 10 Nov 2016 23:27:44 +0100 | From | Greg KH <> | Subject | Re: [kernel-hardening] Re: [RFC v4 PATCH 00/13] HARDENED_ATOMIC |
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On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 10:13:10PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 08:48:38PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote: > > > That said, I still don't much like this. > > > > > > I would much rather you make kref useful and use that. It still means > > > you get to audit all refcounts in the kernel, but hey, you had to do > > > that anyway. > > > > What needs to happen to kref to make it useful? Like many others, I've > > been guilty of using atomic_t for refcounts in the past. > > As it stands kref is a pointless wrapper. If it were to provide > something actually useful, like wrap protection, then it might actually > make sense to use it.
It provides the correct cleanup ability for a reference count and the object it is in, so it's not all that pointless :)
But I'm always willing to change it to make it work better for people, if kref did the wrapping protection (i.e. used a non-wrapping atomic type), then you would have that. I thought that was what this patchset provided...
And yes, this is a horridly large patchset. I've looked at these changes, and in almost all of them, people are using atomic_t as merely a "counter" for something (sequences, rx/tx stats, etc), to get away without having to lock it with an external lock.
So, does it make more sense to just provide a "pointless" api for this type of "counter" pattern: counter_inc() counter_dec() counter_read() counter_set() counter_add() counter_subtract() Those would use the wrapping atomic type, as they can wrap all they want and no one really is in trouble. Once those changes are done, just make atomic_t not wrap and all should be fine, no other code should need to be changed.
We can bikeshed on the function names for a while, to let everyone feel they contributed (counter, kcount, ksequence, sequence_t, cnt_t, etc.)...
And yes, out-of-tree code will work differently, but really, the worse that could happen is their "sequence number" stops wrapping :)
Would that be a better way to implement this?
thanks,
greg k-h
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