On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 9:45 AM, Linus Torvalds <torva...@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 9:33 AM, Oleg Nesterov <o...@redhat.com> wrote: >> >> Firstly, why do we need the IS_ERR_VALUE() check? This is only used by >> do_signal/handle_signal, we do not care if it returns non-zero as long >> as the value can't be confused with -ERESTART.* codes. > > There are system calls that can return "negative" values that aren't errors. > > Notably mmap() can return a valid pointer with the high bit set. > > So syscall_get_error() should return 0 for not just positive return > values, but for those kinds of negative non-error values. > >> And why do we need the TS_ checks? > > Those may be bogus. > >> So why we can't simply change putreg32() to always sign-extend regs->ax >> regs->orig_ax and just do >> >> static inline long syscall_get_error(struct task_struct *task, >> struct pt_regs *regs) >> { >> return regs-ax; >> } > > That would be *complete* garbage. Lots of system calls return positive > values that sure as hell aren't errors.
Does this cause an observable problem? The only things that care are: a) 32-bit debugger pokes some value with the high bit and a 64-bit debugger reads it back. I seriously doubt we care. b) 32-bit debugger pokes some value with the high bit set and the user code switches to 64-bit mode and reads RAX. This case is so terminally broken anyway that we definitely don't care. c) 32-bit debugger pokes some value with the high bit set and syscall_get_error happens. Oleg's proposed change won't change what we do, but it will dramatically simplify the code.