Bug in /proc/lvm/global (garbage printed)

[Thorsten Kukuk]

Hi,

On UltraSPARC and IA64, an "cat /proc/lvm/global" returns only
garbage (it will print the contents of some random memory).

The problem is in the _proc_read_global function. This function does
not use the "page" parameter to return the data. Instead it allocates
it's own buffer and change to "start" parameter to point to it.
The "page" buffer will not be used. The culprint is now in the
proc_file_read() function:

                /* This is a hack to allow mangling of file pos independent
                 * of actual bytes read.  Simply place the data at page,
                 * return the bytes, and set `start' to the desired offset
                 * as an unsigned int. - [e-mail]
                 */
                n -= copy_to_user(buf, start < page ? page : start, n);

In some cases (this cases seems to be always true on UltraSPARC and IA64
and I think it works only by accident on ix32) the data from page and not
from start is used -> page contains randam data which is printed by the
kernel.

I fixed this by the following patch (which works for me on UltraSPARC),
but I don't know if it really correct in all cases. But I think it is.
Don't return a pointer to the buffer, instead copy as far as possible
data to page. This should work as before, since we never returns the
full length of the data, but max. the length of the page buffer.

--- drivers/md/lvm-fs.c	2001/11/09 19:00:38	1.1
+++ drivers/md/lvm-fs.c	2001/11/09 20:50:16
@@ -482,11 +480,15 @@
 		buf = NULL;
 		return 0;
 	}
-	*start = &buf[pos];
-	if (sz - pos < count)
+	/* *start = &buf[pos]; */
+	if (sz - pos < count) {
+		memcpy (page, &buf[pos], sz - pos);
 		return sz - pos;
-	else
+        }
+	else {
+		memcpy (page, &buf[pos], count);
 		return count;
+	}
 
 #undef LVM_PROC_BUF
 }

-- 
Thorsten Kukuk       http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/        [e-mail]
SuSE GmbH            Deutschherrenstr. 15-19       D-90429 Nuernberg
--------------------------------------------------------------------    
Key fingerprint = A368 676B 5E1B 3E46 CFCE  2D97 F8FD 4E23 56C6 FB4B