Re: [RFC PATCH 2/3] powerpc/pseries: Define & use a type for the plpar_hcall() retvals

On 19/10/16 22:47, Michael Ellerman wrote:

Balbir Singh [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On 18/10/16 19:40, Michael Ellerman wrote:

quoted

We have now had two nasty stack corruption bugs caused by incorrect
sizing of the return buffer for plpar_hcall()/plpar_hcall9().

To avoid any more such bugs, define a type which encodes the size of the
return buffer, and change the argument of plpar_hcall() to be of that
type, meaning the compiler will check for us that we passed the right
size buffer.

There isn't an easy way to do this incrementally, without introducing a
new function name, eg. plpar_hcall_with_struct(), which is ugly as hell.
So just do it in one tree-wide change.

Conceptually looks god, but I think we need to abstract the return values
as well. I'll test and see if I can send you something on top of this

Not sure I know what you mean.

Here is an example

-	*slot = retbuf[0];
+	*slot = retvals.v[0];

Could we hide retvals.v[0] under a macro like 

*slot = hcalls_ret_val(retvals, 0);

Since we could end up with similar issues if
someone dereferenced retvals.v[4]

Since we are abstracting under retvals, I was wondering
if we want to further abstract the return values
as well and make retvals opaque to the user


Balbir Singh.