Messages in this thread | | | Subject | deprecated.rst: deprecated strcpy ? (was: [PATCH] checkpatch: add a new check for strcpy/strlcpy uses) | From | Joe Perches <> | Date | Tue, 05 Jan 2021 01:28:18 -0800 |
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On Tue, 2021-01-05 at 14:29 +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote: > On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 2:14 PM Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote: > > > > On Tue, 2021-01-05 at 13:53 +0530, Dwaipayan Ray wrote: > > > strcpy() performs no bounds checking on the destination buffer. > > > This could result in linear overflows beyond the end of the buffer. > > > > > > strlcpy() reads the entire source buffer first. This read > > > may exceed the destination size limit. This can be both inefficient > > > and lead to linear read overflows. > > > > > > The safe replacement to both of these is to use strscpy() instead. > > > Add a new checkpatch warning which alerts the user on finding usage of > > > strcpy() or strlcpy(). > > > > I do not believe that strscpy is preferred over strcpy. > > > > When the size of the output buffer is known to be larger > > than the input, strcpy is faster. > > > > There are about 2k uses of strcpy. > > Is there a use where strcpy use actually matters? > > I don't know offhand... > > > > But I believe compilers do not optimize away the uses of strscpy > > to a simple memcpy like they do for strcpy with a const from > > > > strcpy(foo, "bar"); > > > > Yes the optimization here definitely helps. So in case the programmer > knows that the destination buffer is always larger, then strcpy() should be > preferred? I think the documentation might have been too strict about > strcpy() uses here: > > Documentation/process/deprecated.rst: > "strcpy() performs no bounds checking on the destination buffer. This > could result in linear overflows beyond the end of the buffer, leading to > all kinds of misbehaviors. While `CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE=y` and various > compiler flags help reduce the risk of using this function, there is > no good reason to add new uses of this function. The safe replacement > is strscpy(),..."
Kees/Jonathan:
Perhaps this text is overly restrictive.
There are ~2k uses of strcpy in the kernel.
About half of these are where the buffer length of foo is known and the use is 'strcpy(foo, "bar")' so the compiler converts/optimizes away the strcpy to memcpy and may not even put "bar" into the string table.
I believe strscpy uses do not have this optimization.
Is there a case where the runtime costs actually matters? I expect so.
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