Commits
Linus Torvalds committed 0749708352f
x86: make word-at-a-time strncpy_from_user clear bytes at the end This makes the newly optimized x86 strncpy_from_user clear the final bytes in the word past the final NUL character, rather than copy them as the word they were in the source. NOTE! Unlike the silly semantics of the libc 'strncpy()' function, the kernel strncpy_from_user() has never cleared all of the end of the destination buffer. And neither does it do so now: it only clears the bytes at the end of the last word it copied. So why make this change at all? It doesn't really cost us anything extra (we have to calculate the mask to get the length anyway), and it means that *if* any user actually cares about zeroing the whole buffer, they can do a "memset()" before the strncpy_from_user(), and we will no longer write random bytes after the NUL character. In particular, the buffer contents will now at no point contain random source data from beyond the end of the string. In other words, it makes behavior a bit more repeatable at no new cost, so it's a small cleanup. I've been carrying this as a patch for the last few weeks or so in my tree (done at the same time the sign error was fixed in commit 12e993b89464), I might as well commit it. Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>