[alsa-devel] [PATCH] amixer: add support for TLV byte control read

[Vinod Koul]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 09:09:13AM +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 08:46:23 +0100,
> Vinod Koul wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 07:19:10AM +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > > On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 06:46:52 +0100,
> > > Vinod Koul wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > TLV byte control are new type of byte controls added in kernel where
> > > > controls can have large sizes.
> > > >
> > > > For these controls querying with 4096 size fails, so use the queried size to
> > > > read the control
> > > > 
> > > > This fixes the crash with current cget/contents on these type of controls
> > > 
> > > Hmm...  Theoretically the TLV size and the element size are
> > > independent.  So, it's not good to check only the type being
> > > SND_CTL_ELEM_TYPE_BYTES.  This can be used legally by other cases,
> > > too.
> > > 
> > > Basically it is an abuse in ASoC side to return the size of
> > > TLV by the element's info.  Usually such value would lead to crash,
> > > but the unique point of ASoC ext bytes ctl is that it doesn't have RW
> > > accesses but only TLV_RW accesses.
> > 
> > But isn't that already checked? Since we are in the code which will be
> > executed only for tlv as snd_ctl_elem_info_is_tlv_readable() ensures that.
> > So this is only for tlv + bytes ...
> 
> I meant setting a bogus count value in info would usually lead to a
> crash.  The point isn't about TLV access.
> 
> > > So, instead of only checking the type being BYTES, check the
> > > accesses.  Only when all these conditions are met, we may take the
> > > count as TLV (element) size.  (And still we should have the sanity
> > > check of the value, too.)
> > > 
> > > Yet, this isn't a really "fix" for the crash.  Even without the patch
> > > it shouldn't crash -- it should receive 4096 bytes, and tries to
> > > decode.  Where did you get the crash exactly?
> > 
> > in alsa-lib snd_ctl_hw_elem_tlv() when it tries to do memcpy for tlv read.
> > But the crash is caused as tlv read is large and we have only 4096 size
> > buffer,
> 
> Hm, it has a check
> 
> static int snd_ctl_hw_elem_tlv(snd_ctl_t *handle, int op_flag,
> 			       unsigned int numid,
> 			       unsigned int *tlv, unsigned int tlv_size)
> {
> 	....
> 		if (xtlv->tlv[1] + 2 * sizeof(unsigned int) > tlv_size) {
> 			free(xtlv);
> 			return -EFAULT;
> 		}
> 		memcpy(tlv, xtlv->tlv, xtlv->tlv[1] + 2 * sizeof(unsigned int));
> 
> Do you mean somewhere here triggers a crash?

Yes while it tried to memcpy, in my case 30K sized data to 4K buffer, so I
allocated right one and got all the data

> 
> > so we ensure we give right size buffer here
> 
> Actually we should have an API function that returns the size of TLV.
> Then amixer can adjust the allocation size.

Yes we can add tat too. I want to make coontents and cget work okay while I
add proper TLV support. Maybe we should stop cget on tlv byte type?

-- 
~Vinod