On Fri, 28 Jul 2023 00:09:29 +0200, Justin Stitt wrote:
`strncpy` is deprecated for use on NUL-terminated destination strings [1].
A suitable replacement is `strscpy` [2] due to the fact that it guarantees NUL-termination on its destination buffer argument which is _not_ always the case for `strncpy`!
It should be noted that, in this case, the destination buffer has a length strictly greater than the source string. Moreover, the source string is NUL-terminated (and so is the destination) which means there was no real bug happening here. Nonetheless, this patch would get us one step closer to eliminating the `strncpy` API in the kernel, as its use is too ambiguous. We need to favor less ambiguous replacements such as: strscpy, strscpy_pad, strtomem and strtomem_pad (amongst others).
Technically, my patch yields subtly different behavior. The original implementation with `strncpy` would fill the entire destination buffer with null bytes [3] while `strscpy` will leave the junk, uninitialized bytes trailing after the _mandatory_ NUL-termination. So, if somehow `card->driver` or `card->shortname` require this NUL-padding behavior then `strscpy_pad` should be used. My interpretation, though, is that the aforementioned fields are just fine as NUL-terminated strings. Please correct my assumptions if needed and I'll send in a v2.
Link: https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/90 Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230727-sound-xen-v1-1-89dd161351f1@google.com (related ALSA patch) Signed-off-by: Justin Stitt justinstitt@google.com
Applied now. Thanks.
Takashi