Subject: Re: [V9fs-developer] [PATCH] net/9p: avoid request size exceed to the virtqueue number in the zero copy

From: Dominique Martinet <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2018 10:27:25 +0200

jiangyiwen wrote on Fri, Aug 03, 2018:
> On 2018/8/3 15:32, Dominique Martinet wrote:
> > jiangyiwen wrote on Fri, Aug 03, 2018:
> >> Unfortunately, when the address(input and response headers) are not
> >> at page boundary, it will need two extra entry in the zero copy, or
> >> else it will cause sg array out of bounds.
> >>
> >> To avoid the problem, we should subtract two pages for maxsize.
> > 
> > Good catch, that must have been painful to figure.
> > 
> > Given we know how big the headers are (something like 11 or 23 bytes
> > depending on the op/direction, it's capped by P9_IOHDRSZ at 24),
> > couldn't we just cheat and not use the start of the buffer if we detect
> > it's overlapping?
> 
> Actually, generally the P9_IOHDRSZ will not cause the problem, because
> 24 bytes is too small, but P9_ZC_HDR_SZ(4096 bytes) often cause two pages.
> 
> So I have a question about why we need to use P9_ZC_HDR_SZ, actually we
> may use P9_IOHDRSZ instead.

The reason is historical (for non-dotl versions of 9P), but the reply if
error could be longer than P9_IOHDRSZ in this case - see the code in
p9_check_zc_errors that copies the end of the string back from the zc
buffer to the 4k buffer

I don't see much other reason, though... But I don't understand how that
is a problem - we don't actually put the full P9_ZC_HDR_SZ in chan->sg
for headers, but these:
        out = pack_sg_list(chan->sg, 0,
                           VIRTQUEUE_NUM, req->tc.sdata, req->tc.size);
        in = pack_sg_list(chan->sg, out,
                          VIRTQUEUE_NUM, req->rc.sdata, in_hdr_len);

req->tc.size is the size of the header up till that point and in_hdr_len
is the size expected from the header.
That's why I suggested that if these are on a page boundary, we could
just memcpy that data further within the P9_ZC_HDR_SZ-sized buffer and
use that for the header (then move it back to the start of the buffer
for the reply header)

-- 
Dominique