The autofs packet size has had a very unfortunate size problem on x86:
because the alignment of 'u64' differs in 32-bit and 64-bit modes, and
because the packet data was not 8-byte aligned, the size of the autofsv5
packet structure differed between 32-bit and 64-bit modes despite
looking otherwise identical (300 vs 304 bytes respectively).
We first fixed that up by making the 64-bit compat mode know about this
problem in commit a32744d4ab ("autofs: work around unhappy compat
problem on x86-64"), and that made a 32-bit 'systemd' work happily on a
64-bit kernel because everything then worked the same way as on a 32-bit
kernel.
But it turned out that 'automount' had actually known and worked around
this problem in user space, so fixing the kernel to do the proper 32-bit
compatibility handling actually *broke* 32-bit automount on a 64-bit
kernel, because it knew that the packet sizes were wrong and expected
those incorrect sizes.
As a result, we ended up reverting that compatibility mode fix, and
thus breaking systemd again, in commit fcbf94b9de.
With both automount and systemd doing a single read() system call, and
verifying that they get *exactly* the size they expect but using
different sizes, it seemed that fixing one of them inevitably seemed to
break the other. At one point, a patch I seriously considered applying
from Michael Tokarev did a "strcmp()" to see if it was automount that
was doing the operation. Ugly, ugly.
However, a prettier solution exists now thanks to the packetized pipe
mode. By marking the communication pipe as being packetized (by simply
setting the O_DIRECT flag), we can always just write the bigger packet
size, and if user-space does a smaller read, it will just get that
partial end result and the extra alignment padding will simply be thrown
away.
This makes both automount and systemd happy, since they now get the size
they asked for, and the kernel side of autofs simply no longer needs to
care - it could pad out the packet arbitrarily.
Of course, if there is some *other* user of autofs (please, please,
please tell me it ain't so - and we haven't heard of any) that tries to
read the packets with multiple writes, that other user will now be
broken - the whole point of the packetized mode is that one system call
gets exactly one packet, and you cannot read a packet in pieces.
Tested-by: Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>
Cc: Thomas Meyer <thomas@m3y3r.de>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
64f371bc31