On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 05:56:18AM +1000, Aleksa Sarai wrote:

On 2019-09-05, Al Viro [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 08:23:03PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

quoted

Because every caller of that function right now has that limit set
anyway iirc. So we can either remove it from here and place it back for
the individual callers or leave it in the helper.
Also, I'm really asking, why not? Is it unreasonable to have an upper
bound on the size (for a long time probably) or are you disagreeing with
PAGE_SIZE being used? PAGE_SIZE limit is currently used by sched, perf,
bpf, and clone3 and in a few other places.

For a primitive that can be safely used with any size (OK, any within
the usual 2Gb limit)?  Why push the random policy into the place where
it doesn't belong?

Seriously, what's the point?  If they want to have a large chunk of
userland memory zeroed or checked for non-zeroes - why would that
be a problem?

Thinking about it some more, there isn't really any r/w amplification --
so there isn't much to gain by passing giant structs. Though, if we are
going to permit 2GB buffers, isn't that also an argument to use
memchr_inv()? :P

I think we should just do a really dumb, easy to understand minimal
thing for now. It could even just be what every caller is doing right
now anyway with the get_user() loop.
The only way to settle memchr_inv() vs all the other clever ways
suggested here is to benchmark it and see if it matters *for the current
users* of this helper. If it does, great we can do it. If it doesn't why
bother having that argument right now?
Once we somehow end up in a possible world where we apparently have
decided it's a great idea to copy 2GB argument structures for a syscall
into or from the kernel we can start optimizing the hell out of this.
Before that and especially with current callers I honestly doubt it
matters whether we use memchr_inv() or while() {get_user()} loops.

Christian

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