Re: [PATCH] net: af_packet: Don't initialize vnet_hdr

From: David Miller
Date: Thu May 12 2011 - 17:36:18 EST


From: Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 14:33:20 -0700

> On Thu, 2011-05-12 at 17:26 -0400, David Miller wrote:
>> From: Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 13:36:10 -0700
>>
>> > Save a memset, initialize only the portion necessary.
>> >
>> > packet_snd either gets this structure completely from
>> > memcpy_fromiovec or uses only the hdr_len set to 0,
>> > so don't always initialize the structure to 0.
>> >
>> > Signed-off-by: Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> On ARM this won't be tightly packed, therefore you'll leave
>> uninitialized pieces of padding in this structure and this
>> thing is an "on-the-wire" network header.
>>
>> I'm not applying this.
>
> I believe that it's only sent when po->has_vnet_hdr
> is set. In that case, it's completely filled from
> memcpy_fromiovec. In the not set po->has_vnet_hdr case,
> only vnet_hdr.hdr_len is accessed by packet_alloc_skb.

I think with the way this code is protecting accesses to vnet_hdr,
it's going to start warning that some parts "may" be use
uninitialized.

It's also slightly ugly to partially initialize these on-stack things.

I would rather see the code rearranged such that this sort of
hackish scheme isn't necessary.

Again, I'm not applying this.
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