[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 <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/mm/util.c b/mm/util.c
index 7368479220b3..e14fa84ef39a 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
  *