I just started looking into the horribly confused state of buffer zeroing for the various copy_from_user variants. This came up after we did some minor tuning last week.
copy_from_user_inatomic() seems to be documented to not zero the buffer. This is definitely *NOT* true on x86-64, although it does seem to be true on i386 -- on x86-64, we carry along a "zerorest" flag but in all possible codepaths it will be set to true unless the remaining byte count is zero anyway. Furthermore, on at least x86-64, if we do an early bailout, we don't zero the entire buffer in the case of a hard-coded 10- or 16-byte buffer (why only those sizes is anybody's guess.) See lines 71-88 of uaccess_64.h. I'd like to figure out what is the required and what is the desirable behavior here, and then fix the code accordingly. -hpa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/