[PATCH] sys_alarm() unsigned signed conversion fixup

alarm() calls the kernel with an unsigend int timeout in seconds.  The
value is stored in the tv_sec field of a struct timeval to setup the
itimer.  The tv_sec field of struct timeval is of type long, which causes
the tv_sec value to be negative on 32 bit machines if seconds > INT_MAX.

Before the hrtimer merge (pre 2.6.16) such a negative value was converted
to the maximum jiffies timeout by the timeval_to_jiffies conversion.  It's
not clear whether this was intended or just happened to be done by the
timeval_to_jiffies code.

hrtimers expect a timeval in canonical form and treat a negative timeout as
already expired.  This breaks the legitimate usage of alarm() with a
timeout value > INT_MAX seconds.

For 32 bit machines it is therefor necessary to limit the internal seconds
value to avoid API breakage.  Instead of doing this in all implementations
of sys_alarm the duplicated sys_alarm code is moved into a common function
in itimer.c

Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 37 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/itimer.c b/kernel/itimer.c
index 379be2f8c84..a2dc375927d 100644
--- a/kernel/itimer.c
+++ b/kernel/itimer.c
@@ -226,6 +226,43 @@ again:
 	return 0;
 }
 
+/**
+ * alarm_setitimer - set alarm in seconds
+ *
+ * @seconds:	number of seconds until alarm
+ *		0 disables the alarm
+ *
+ * Returns the remaining time in seconds of a pending timer or 0 when
+ * the timer is not active.
+ *
+ * On 32 bit machines the seconds value is limited to (INT_MAX/2) to avoid
+ * negative timeval settings which would cause immediate expiry.
+ */
+unsigned int alarm_setitimer(unsigned int seconds)
+{
+	struct itimerval it_new, it_old;
+
+#if BITS_PER_LONG < 64
+	if (seconds > INT_MAX)
+		seconds = INT_MAX;
+#endif
+	it_new.it_value.tv_sec = seconds;
+	it_new.it_value.tv_usec = 0;
+	it_new.it_interval.tv_sec = it_new.it_interval.tv_usec = 0;
+
+	do_setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, &it_new, &it_old);
+
+	/*
+	 * We can't return 0 if we have an alarm pending ...  And we'd
+	 * better return too much than too little anyway
+	 */
+	if ((!it_old.it_value.tv_sec && it_old.it_value.tv_usec) ||
+	      it_old.it_value.tv_usec >= 500000)
+		it_old.it_value.tv_sec++;
+
+	return it_old.it_value.tv_sec;
+}
+
 asmlinkage long sys_setitimer(int which,
 			      struct itimerval __user *value,
 			      struct itimerval __user *ovalue)