Re: [PATCH v2 5.4 regression fix] x86/boot: Provide memzero_explicit

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Mon Oct 07 2019 - 10:00:30 EST



* Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The purgatory code now uses the shared lib/crypto/sha256.c sha256
> implementation. This needs memzero_explicit, implement this.
>
> Reported-by: Arvind Sankar <nivedita@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Fixes: 906a4bb97f5d ("crypto: sha256 - Use get/put_unaligned_be32 to get input, memzero_explicit")
> Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
> Changes in v2:
> - Add barrier_data() call after the memset, making the function really
> explicit. Using barrier_data() works fine in the purgatory (build)
> environment.
> ---
> arch/x86/boot/compressed/string.c | 6 ++++++
> 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)
>
> diff --git a/arch/x86/boot/compressed/string.c b/arch/x86/boot/compressed/string.c
> index 81fc1eaa3229..654a7164a702 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/boot/compressed/string.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/boot/compressed/string.c
> @@ -50,6 +50,12 @@ void *memset(void *s, int c, size_t n)
> return s;
> }
>
> +void memzero_explicit(void *s, size_t count)
> +{
> + memset(s, 0, count);
> + barrier_data(s);
> +}

So the barrier_data() is only there to keep LTO from optimizing out the
seemingly unused function?

Is there no canonical way to do that, instead of a seemingly obscure
barrier_data() call - which would require a comment at minimum.

We do have $(DISABLE_LTO), not sure whether it's applicable here though.

Thanks,

Ingo