Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2021 17:51:23 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: Dominic Chen <d.c.ddcc@...il.com>
Cc: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Issue with fread() and unaligned readv()

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 05:39:43PM -0400, Dominic Chen wrote:
> Not sure this counts as a problem in musl or the application, but
> I've been debugging a return error of EINVAL from `fread(&buf, 8,
> 16, f)`, where `f = fopen("/proc/self/pagemap", "r")`. Internally,
> musl converts this into a call to `readv(f->fd, iov, 2)`, where `iov
> = {{iov_base = buf, iov_len = 127}, {iov_base = f->buf, iov_len =
> 1024}}`. However, it turns out that the kernel VFS read
> implementation inside `pagemap_read` checks that both the file
> position and count are divisible by PM_ENTRY_BYTES (8 on x86_64),
> otherwise it rejects the read with EINVAL. In comparison, glibc's
> `_IO_file_xsgetn` does appear to try to maintain read alignment,
> although I haven't looked at it in detail.

You can't use stdio to read or write special files/devices that depend
on the reads or writes happening in particular units, because the
relationship between stdio operations and the underlying
buffer-fill/flush operations on the underlying fd is unspecified. It's
really unfortunate that the kernel lies that procfs files are regular
files but doesn't give them regular-file semantics, but you really
need to use direct operations on the fd in the units the interface
requires, rather than stdio, to work with these files.

Rich

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.