Commit 1196bdce authored by Chuck Lever's avatar Chuck Lever
Browse files

SUNRPC: Document validity guarantees of the pointer returned by reserve_space



A subtlety of this API is that if the @nbytes region traverses a
page boundary, the next __xdr_commit_encode will shift the data item
in the XDR encode buffer. This makes the returned pointer point to
something else, leading to unexpected behavior.

There are a few cases where the caller saves the returned pointer
and then later uses it to insert a computed value into an earlier
part of the stream. This can be safe only if either:

 - the data item is guaranteed to be in the XDR buffer's head, and
   thus is not ever going to be near a page boundary, or
 - the data item is no larger than 4 octets, since XDR alignment
   rules require all data items to start on 4-octet boundaries

But that safety is only an artifact of the current implementation.
It would be less brittle if these "safe" uses were eventually
replaced.

Reviewed-by: default avatarNeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarChuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
parent 4163ee71
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