linux-kernel - Re: /proc/net/dev regression

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Date:	Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:27:06 +0000
From:	Al Viro <viro@...IV.linux.org.uk>
To:	"Carlos R. Mafra" <crmafra@...il.com>
Cc:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Hauke Mehrtens <hauke@...ke-m.de>,
	"John W. Linville" <linville@...driver.com>, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: /proc/net/dev regression

On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 11:25:18PM +0000, Carlos R. Mafra wrote:
> [mafra@...ux-g29b:wmnet]$ cat net_dev_bad.txt
> Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
>  face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
>     lo:     600       8    0    0    0     0          0         0      600       8    0    0    0     0       0          0
> wlp3s0b1: 9266848    7298    0    0    0     0          0         0   372229    4030    0    0    0     0       0          0
> 
> And for some reason this change confuses 'wmnet'. Reading the source code
> of 'wmnet' I found that it reads the packets as follows,
> 
> 	totalpackets_in = strtoul(&buffer[15], NULL, 10);
> 
> I am not sure if 'wmnet' could do this better (any suggestions?),

*snort*

well, yes - it's called scanf().  And if one is really, really nervous
about the overhead of <gasp> parsing a bunch of integers (as if fopen/
fgets/fclose alone won't cost enough to make constantly calling that
sucker a bad idea), just use ptr + <something> - 6 instead of
&buffer[<something>] in there.  That thing has just found where the
colon was (and replaced it with NUL), so dealing with "the first field
turned out to be too long and shifted everything past it" isn't hard.

> but the fact is that it was working before and now it is not.

True.  Mind you, the real issue is that this code expects the interface
names to be never longer than 6 characters, but then /proc/net/dev layout
strongly suggests that.  Hell knows; it is a regression and it does
break real-world userland code.  The only way to avoid that, AFAICS, is
to prohibit interface names longer than 6 chars ;-/

Lovely combination of crappy ABI (procfs file layout), crappy userland
code relying on details of said ABI out of sheer laziness and triggering
kernel change producing bloody long interface names...

Incidentally, sufficiently long interface name will produce other fun issues
for a docked app - it simply won't fit into 64x64 square on screen ;-)
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