Re: CVS commit: src/sys/dev

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Sat, Dec 04, 2010 at 03:50:25PM -0600, Michael Graff wrote:
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> I admit to a certain lack of understanding the twisty maze of pointers
> and memory mapping magic at play here, but is simply checking the length
> enough?  That is, what happens if I pass in a structure that is smaller
> than expected?
> 
> That is, is there a way to check the actual size of the data passed into
> the ioctl, rather than the field in the structure we expect, or is that
> done at a higher level?

The length of the program's buffer is unknown.
The kernel uses the high 16 bits of the ioctl command to indicate
whether to read/write (2 bits) and a length (14 bits).
If either control bit is set, the ioctl syscall stub will do the
copyin/out and pass the actual device driver a pointer to the
in-kernel buffer.
So the device driver can always access the buffer length implied
from the command.

To my mind this is a horrid hack :-)

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost