linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] perf: Introduce extended syscall error reporting

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <1440492739.2192.7.camel@sipsolutions.net>
Date:	Tue, 25 Aug 2015 10:52:19 +0200
From:	Johannes Berg <johannes@...solutions.net>
To:	Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@...ux.intel.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, adrian.hunter@...el.com,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@...radead.org>,
	Vince Weaver <vince@...ter.net>,
	Stephane Eranian <eranian@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] perf: Introduce extended syscall error reporting

On Mon, 2015-08-24 at 17:32 +0300, Alexander Shishkin wrote:

> This time around, I employed a linker trick to convert the structures
> containing extended error information into integers, which are then
> made to look just like normal error codes so that IS_ERR_VALUE() and
> friends would still work correctly on them. So no extra pointers in
> the struct perf_event or anywhere else; the extended error codes are
> passed around like normal error codes. They only need to be converted
> in syscalls' topmost return statements. This is done in 1/6.
> 

For the record, as we discussed separately, I'd love to see this move
to more general infrastructure. In wireless (nl80211), for example, we
have a few hundred (!) callsites returning -EINVAL, mostly based on
malformed netlink attributes, and it can be very difficult to figure
out what went wrong; debugging mostly employs a variation of Hugh's
trick.

It would be absolutely necessary to support modules, however that could
get tricky: unless we pass a THIS_MODULE through in some way to
netlink_ack() (in the nl80211 case) we'd have to store the actual index
inside the err_site and assign it on module load somehow. Passing the
module pointer seems better, but has even more wrinkles like what to do
when the error came from a nested call (e.g. nla_parse()) that's in a
different modules ...

Unrelated to all that - maybe perf_errno_to_site() should have some
range checking?

johannes
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/