Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 209.132.180.67 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.132.180.67;
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <201907281218.F6D2C2DD@keescook>
In-Reply-To: <201907281218.F6D2C2DD@keescook>
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Sun, 28 Jul 2019 12:43:15 -0700
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wj+1vDh2=eZExibYF9Lo0GsGxaAjxCSwpUFVURrN44cUQ@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] meminit fix for v5.3-rc2
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc:     Linux List Kernel Mailing <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Precedence: bulk

On Sun, Jul 28, 2019 at 12:21 PM Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> Please pull this meminit fix for v5.3-rc2.

Side noe: I find "meminit" a confusing description for the structleak
thing. When I hear it, it sounds like some generic memory
initialization thing in the VM layer (which we obviously do also
have), not the stack variable initialization.

Also, have you guys talked to gcc people about just making it a real
feature, like I think it is for clang? In particular, I still suspect
that we could/should  just make zero-filling the *default* in the long
run, and say "our C standard is that local variables are initialized
to zero, exactly the same way static variables are".

I know you posted some numbers somewhere (well, I'm pretty sure you
did) and the full stack initialization really was pretty cheap,
wasn't it?

               Linus