On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 23:11, Matthias Schwarzott <zzam@gentoo.org> wrote:
> It is about ioctl failures on amd64:
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286041
>
> A bad parameter type to an ioctl() call causes udev-146 to generate "error
> getting buffer for inotify" messages in syslog. The offending code is
> roughly:
>
> ssize_t nbytes, pos;
> // ...
> ioctl(fd, FIONREAD, &nbytes);
>
> where ssize_t is 64 bits on amd64, but the kernel code for FIONREAD (at least
> through gentoo-sources-2.6.31) uses type int:
>
> p = (void __user *) arg;
> switch (cmd) {
> case FIONREAD:
> // ...
> ret = put_user(send_len, (int __user *) p);
>
> so the upper 32 bits of "nbytes" are left uninitialized, and the subsequent
> malloc(nbytes) fails unless those 32 bits happen to be zero (or the system has
> a LOT of memory).
/* read inotify messages */
static int handle_inotify(struct udev *udev)
{
- ssize_t nbytes, pos;
+ int nbytes, pos;
char *buf;
struct inotify_event *ev;