From 1a2f67b459bb7846d4a15924face63eb2683acc2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alexey Dobriyan Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:27:20 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] kmemdup: introduce One of idiomatic ways to duplicate a region of memory is dst = kmalloc(len, GFP_KERNEL); if (!dst) return -ENOMEM; memcpy(dst, src, len); which is neat code except a programmer needs to write size twice. Which sometimes leads to mistakes. If len passed to kmalloc is smaller that len passed to memcpy, it's straight overwrite-beyond-end. If len passed to memcpy is smaller than len passed to kmalloc, it's either a) legit behaviour ;-), or b) cloned buffer will contain garbage in second half. Slight trolling of commit lists shows several duplications bugs done exactly because of diverged lenghts: Linux: [CRYPTO]: Fix memcpy/memset args. [PATCH] memcpy/memset fixes OpenBSD: kerberosV/src/lib/asn1: der_copy.c:1.4 If programmer is given only one place to play with lengths, I believe, such mistakes could be avoided. With kmemdup, the snippet above will be rewritten as: dst = kmemdup(src, len, GFP_KERNEL); if (!dst) return -ENOMEM; This also leads to smaller code (kzalloc effect). Quick grep shows 200+ places where kmemdup() can be used. Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- mm/util.c | 18 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+) (limited to 'mm/util.c') diff --git a/mm/util.c b/mm/util.c index 73684792..e14fa84 100644 --- a/mm/util.c +++ b/mm/util.c @@ -40,6 +40,24 @@ char *kstrdup(const char *s, gfp_t gfp) } EXPORT_SYMBOL(kstrdup); +/** + * kmemdup - duplicate region of memory + * + * @src: memory region to duplicate + * @len: memory region length + * @gfp: GFP mask to use + */ +void *kmemdup(const void *src, size_t len, gfp_t gfp) +{ + void *p; + + p = ____kmalloc(len, gfp); + if (p) + memcpy(p, src, len); + return p; +} +EXPORT_SYMBOL(kmemdup); + /* * strndup_user - duplicate an existing string from user space * -- cgit v1.1