can: avoid using timeval for uapi
The can subsystem communicates with user space using a bcm_msg_head
header, which contains two timestamps. This is problematic for
multiple reasons:
a) The structure layout is currently incompatible between 64-bit
user space and 32-bit user space, and cannot work in compat
mode (other than x32).
b) The timeval structure layout will change in 32-bit user
space when we fix the y2038 overflow problem by redefining
time_t to 64-bit, making new 32-bit user space incompatible
with the current kernel interface.
Cars last a long time and often use old kernels, so the actual
users of this code are the most likely ones to migrate to y2038
safe user space.
This tries to work around part of the problem by changing the
publicly visible user interface in the header, but not the binary
interface. Fortunately, the values passed around in the structure
are relative times and do not actually suffer from the y2038
overflow, so 32-bit is enough here.
We replace the use of 'struct timeval' with a newly defined
'struct bcm_timeval' that uses the exact same binary layout
as before and that still suffers from problem a) but not problem
b).
The downside of this approach is that any user space program
that currently assigns a timeval structure to these members
rather than writing the tv_sec/tv_usec portions individually
will suffer a compile-time error when built with an updated
kernel header. Fixing this error makes it work fine with old
and new headers though.
We could address problem a) by using '__u32' or 'int' members
rather than 'long', but that would have a more significant
downside in also breaking support for all existing 64-bit user
binaries that might be using this interface, which is likely
not acceptable.
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Oliver Hartkopp <socketcan@hartkopp.net>
Cc: linux-can@vger.kernel.org
Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Marc Kleine-Budde <mkl@pengutronix.de>
2 files changed