Re: regarding mprotect() implementation in 2.6.26 kernel

Previous thread: mlock() return value issue in kernel 2.6.23.17 by Halesh on Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 3:15 am. (4 messages)

Next thread: 2.6.27-rc1 process time accounting by Lukas Hejtmanek on Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 3:43 am. (3 messages)
From: Maxin John
Date: Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 3:24 am

Dear Christoph Hellwig,

( I guess you are the right person to ask this question ?)

The POSIX.2 specification of mprotect() says:

errorno should be set as ENOMEM if the addresses in the range [addr,
(addr + len)] are invalid for the address space of a process, or
specify one or more pages which are not mapped.

However, in the mprotect implementation  (asmlinkage long
sys_mprotect(unsigned long start, size_t len, unsigned long prot)) in
linux/mm/mprotect.c file, if we call mprotect() with start as NULL and
len as 0, mprotect() returns 0 and it is not setting the errono.The
following code confirms this behaviour.


*********** mprotect check code ********************

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>

int main()
{

       int fd, ret;
       char *address;
       errno = 0;

       fd = open("./mmap_file", O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 766);
       address = (char *) mmap(0, 100, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, fd, 0);

       /* address argument is NULL and length argument is 0 */

       if ((ret = mprotect(NULL, 0, PROT_READ)) == -1) {
               printf("%s Error \n", strerror(errno));
               printf("mprotect functionality is correct.\n");
       } else {
               printf("mprotect functionality needs to be verified \n");
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
       }
       close(fd);
       return 0;
}

*********** mprotect check code ********************

Is there a reason to return 0 when the len is 0 and start is NULL ? Is
it intentional ? If not, it should be fixed.

Cheers,

Maxin B. John
Bangalore, India
--

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 8:09 am

Address 0 is a valid process address.  And you've set the length to
zero, so you technically haven't referred to any memory at all, so it
doesn't matter what the address is.

    J
--

From: Maxin John
Date: Monday, August 4, 2008 - 3:19 am

Dear Jeremy,

              Thank you very much for the information and I am sorry
for my delayed reply.

        As per the patch created by Mr. hirofumi for the 2.5.26 kernel
which is described in
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.5/ChangeLog-2.5.26 ,
and
http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.6/?PAGE=gnupatch&REV=1.403.147.22
, the mprotect system call will set errno as ENOMEM instead of
EFAULT.

But the latest man page(man-pages-3.05) of mprotect still contains
information regarding EFAULT. The SuSv3 specification of mprotect also
doesn't say anything about EFAULT in the mprotect() details. The
following patch removes the information regarding EFAULT from the
mprotect man page.

diff -Naur man-pages-3.05/man2/mprotect.2
man-pages-3.05_modified/man2/mprotect.2
--- man-pages-3.05/man2/mprotect.2      2008-07-23 19:42:13.000000000 +0530
+++ man-pages-3.05_modified/man2/mprotect.2     2008-08-04
15:34:33.400869088 +0530
@@ -87,9 +87,6 @@
 to mark it
 .BR PROT_WRITE .
 .TP
-.B EFAULT
-The memory cannot be accessed.
-.TP
 .B EINVAL
 \fIaddr\fP is not a valid pointer,
 or not a multiple of the system page size.
~

  Please advise me if this information is irrelevant or wrong.

Thanks and Regards,

Maxin B. John
Bangalore, India.


--

From: Michael Kerrisk
Date: Monday, August 4, 2008 - 3:34 am

Hallo Maxin,



Before I apply this...  Did you check what was the situation in 2.4 kernels?

Cheers,




-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html
--

From: Michael Kerrisk
Date: Monday, August 4, 2008 - 3:41 am

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Michael Kerrisk

So, after a quick search, it looks as though in kernels before 2.4.19,
the EFAULT error resulted instead of ENOMEM for this case.  Does that
sound right to you?

Cheers,




-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html
--

From: Maxin John
Date: Monday, August 4, 2008 - 4:18 am

Yes, I do agree with you. After Linux Kernel version 2.4.19 , the
ENOMEM error resulted instead of EFAULT in the mprotect().

Regards,

Maxin B. John
Bangalore, India
--

Previous thread: mlock() return value issue in kernel 2.6.23.17 by Halesh on Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 3:15 am. (4 messages)

Next thread: 2.6.27-rc1 process time accounting by Lukas Hejtmanek on Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 3:43 am. (3 messages)