On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 08:17:59AM +0200, Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 06:17:58PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
sparse is indeed an option. The current implementation doesn't warn on an explicit cast from (void __user *) to (unsigned long) since that's a valid thing in the kernel. I couldn't figure out if there's any other __attribute__ that could be used to warn of such conversion.
sparse doesn't have such attribute but would an new option that would warn on such cast be a solution for your case?
I can't tell for sure whether such sparse option would be the full solution but detecting explicit __user pointer casts to long is a good starting point. So far this patchset pretty much relies on detecting a syscall failure and trying to figure out why, patching the kernel. It doesn't really scale.
As a side note, we have cases in the user-kernel ABI where the user address type is "unsigned long": mmap() and friends. My feedback on an early version of this patchset was to always require untagged pointers coming from user space on such syscalls, so no need for explicit untagging.