Subject: Re: [WTF?] random test in netlink_sendmsg()

From: Al Viro <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 04:51:33 +0000

On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 03:25:00AM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> 	    msg->msg_iter.type == KVEC_ITER &&

ITER_IOVEC, that is.  And that way it even works...  Are you OK with the
commit below?

netlink: make the check for "send from tx_ring" deterministic
    
As it is, zero msg_iovlen means that the first iovec in the kernel
array of iovecs is left uninitialized, so checking if its ->iov_base
is NULL is random.  Since the real users of that thing are doing
sendto(fd, NULL, 0, ...), they are getting msg_iovlen = 1 and
msg_iov[0] = {NULL, 0}, which is what this test is trying to catch.
As suggested by davem, let's just check that msg_iovlen was 1 and
msg_iov[0].iov_base was NULL - _that_ is well-defined and it catches
what we want to catch.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <[email-masked]>
---
diff --git a/net/netlink/af_netlink.c b/net/netlink/af_netlink.c
index cc9bcf0..5bcb58c 100644
--- a/net/netlink/af_netlink.c
+++ b/net/netlink/af_netlink.c
@@ -2304,7 +2304,11 @@ static int netlink_sendmsg(struct kiocb *kiocb, struct socket *sock,
 			goto out;
 	}
 
+        /* It's a really convoluted way for userland to ask for mmaped
+	 * sendmsg(), but that's what we've got...  */
 	if (netlink_tx_is_mmaped(sk) &&
+	    msg->msg_iter.type == ITER_IOVEC &&
+	    msg->msg_iter.nr_segs == 1 &&
 	    msg->msg_iter.iov->iov_base == NULL) {
 		err = netlink_mmap_sendmsg(sk, msg, dst_portid, dst_group,
 					   siocb);