Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You (and the author) are misunderstanding. These are all userspace pointers. If the process passes the kernel a buffer and tells it to access it past the end, the kernel will happily do so. It applies all the standard memory protection rules, which means that if your pointer is unmapped or unwritable, the kernel will signal the error (as a SIGSEGV) just as if the process had touched the memory itself.

It's no different that creating a 1024 byte buffer and telling read() to read 2048 bytes into it.

To be fair there's an API bug here in that "fd_set" is a fixed-size thing for historical compatibility reasons, while the kernel accepts arbitrarily large buffers now. So code cutting and pasting from historical examples will have a essentially needless 1024 FD limit.

Stated differently: the POSIX select() has a fixed limit of file descriptors, the linux implementation is extensible. But no one uses the latter feature (because at that scale poll and epoll are much better fits) and there's no formal API for it in the glibc headers.

I don't get where my misunderstanding lies. Didn't I point out that the __copy_to_user call returns EFAULT if the memory is unmapped or unwritable? The problem is that some parts of the user stack may be mapped and writable although they're past the end of the fd_set structure.

> there's no formal API for it in the glibc headers

The author claims you can pass nfds > 1024 to select(2).If you use the fd_set structure with a size of 1024, this may lead to memory corruption if an FD > 1023 becomes ready if I understand correctly.

Once more, the kernel has never been responsible for managing userspace memory. If the userspace process directs the kernel to write to memory it didn't "intend" the kernel to write to, the kernel will happily do so. Think again on the example of the read() system call I mentioned. How do you propose to fix the problem there?

The "problem", such as it is here, is that the POSIX behavior for select() (that it supports only a fixed size for fd_set) was extended in the Linux kernel[1] to allow for arbitrary file descriptor counts. But the POSIX API for select() was not equivalently extended, if you want to use this feature you need to call it with the Linux system call API and not the stuff you find in example code or glibc headers.

[1] To be perfectly honest I don't know if this is unique to Linux. It's a pretty obvious feature, and I bet various BSDs or OS X or whatnot have probably done it too. But no one cares because at the 1024+ FD level System V poll() is a better API, and event-based polling is better still. It's just Unix history at this point and no one's going to fix it for you.

Your example on read(2) is a good one. There's no way to fix it purely by changing the API because, by nature, the user chooses the size of the buffer.

The difference is that fd_set is a structure that's not defined by the user. If fd_set had a standard size, the kernel could verify that nfds is within the allowed range for the fd_set structure. The select(2) system call would be harder to misuse then, although misuse would still be possible by passing custom buffers instead of pointers to fd_set structures. In that sense, I think we agree on the "problem".

It's indeed just a bit of Unix history, but I was surprised by it nonetheless.

I think ajross would argue that if anything, it is glibc's responsibility to check nfds <-> sizeof(fd_set), rather than the kernel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com