netdev - Re: [PATCH bpf-next v2] libbpf: Use dynamically allocated buffer when receiving netlink messages

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]

Date:   Sun, 13 Feb 2022 21:52:45 -0800
From:   Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@...il.com>
To:     Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@...hat.com>
Cc:     Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...nel.org>,
        Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>,
        Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@...nel.org>,
        Martin KaFai Lau <kafai@...com>,
        Song Liu <songliubraving@...com>, Yonghong Song <yhs@...com>,
        John Fastabend <john.fastabend@...il.com>,
        KP Singh <kpsingh@...nel.org>,
        Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi <memxor@...il.com>,
        Zhiqian Guan <zhguan@...hat.com>,
        Networking <netdev@...r.kernel.org>, bpf <bpf@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH bpf-next v2] libbpf: Use dynamically allocated buffer when
 receiving netlink messages

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022 at 7:17 AM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@...hat.com> wrote:
>
> Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@...il.com> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 3:49 PM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@...hat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> When receiving netlink messages, libbpf was using a statically allocated
> >> stack buffer of 4k bytes. This happened to work fine on systems with a 4k
> >> page size, but on systems with larger page sizes it can lead to truncated
> >> messages. The user-visible impact of this was that libbpf would insist no
> >> XDP program was attached to some interfaces because that bit of the netlink
> >> message got chopped off.
> >>
> >> Fix this by switching to a dynamically allocated buffer; we borrow the
> >> approach from iproute2 of using recvmsg() with MSG_PEEK|MSG_TRUNC to get
> >> the actual size of the pending message before receiving it, adjusting the
> >> buffer as necessary. While we're at it, also add retries on interrupted
> >> system calls around the recvmsg() call.
> >>
> >> v2:
> >>   - Move peek logic to libbpf_netlink_recv(), don't double free on ENOMEM.
> >>
> >> Reported-by: Zhiqian Guan <zhguan@...hat.com>
> >> Fixes: 8bbb77b7c7a2 ("libbpf: Add various netlink helpers")
> >> Acked-by: Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi <memxor@...il.com>
> >> Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@...hat.com>
> >> ---
> >
> > Applied to bpf-next.
>
> Awesome, thanks!
>
> > One improvement would be to avoid initial malloc of 4096, especially
> > if that size is enough for most cases. You could detect this through
> > iov.iov_base == buf and not free(iov.iov_base) at the end. Seems
> > reliable and simple enough. I'll leave it up to you to follow up, if
> > you think it's a good idea.
>
> Hmm, seems distributions tend to default the stack size limit to 8k; so
> not sure if blowing half of that on a buffer just to avoid a call to
> malloc() in a non-performance-sensitive is ideal to begin with? I think
> I'd prefer to just keep the dynamic allocation...

8KB for user-space thread stack, really? Not 2MB by default? Are you
sure you are not confusing this with kernel threads?

>
> -Toke
>