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Commit 65a8b287 authored by Daniel Gibson's avatar Daniel Gibson Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman
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tty: n_tty: Restore EOF push handling behavior

TTYs in ICANON mode have a special case that allows "pushing" a line
without a regular EOL character (like newline), by using EOF (the EOT
character - ASCII 0x4) as a pseudo-EOL. It is silently discarded, so
the reader of the PTS will receive the line *without* EOF or any other
terminating character.

This special case has an edge case: What happens if the readers buffer
is the same size as the line (without EOF)? Will they be able to tell
if the whole line is received, i.e. if the next read() will return more
of the same line or the next line?

There are two possibilities,  that both have (dis)advantages:

1. The next read() returns 0. FreeBSD (13.0) and OSX (10.11) do this.
   Advantage: The reader can interpret this as "the line is over".
   Disadvantage: read() returning 0 means EOF, the reader could also
   interpret it as "there's no more data" and stop reading or even
   close the PT.

2. The next read() returns the next line, the EOF is silently discarded.
   Solaris (or at least OpenIndiana 2021.10) does this, Linux has done
   do this since commit 40d5e090 ("n_tty: Fix EOF push handling");
   this behavior was recently broken by commit 35930307 ("tty:
   n_tty: do not look ahead for EOL character past the end of the buffer").
   Advantage: read() won't return 0 (EOF), reader less likely to be
   confused (and things like `while(read(..)>0)` don't break)
   Disadvantage: The reader can't really know if the read() continues
   the last line (that filled the whole read buffer) or starts a
   new line.

As both options are defensible (and are used by other Unix-likes), it's
best to stick to the "old" behavior since "n_tty: Fix EOF push handling"
of 2013, i.e. silently discard that EOF.

This patch - that I actually got from Linus for testing and only
modified slightly - restores that behavior by skipping an EOF
character if it's the next character after reading is done.

Based on a patch from Linus Torvalds.

Link: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215611
Fixes: 35930307

 ("tty: n_tty: do not look ahead for EOL character past the end of the buffer")
Cc: Peter Hurley <peter@hurleysoftware.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Jiri Slaby <jirislaby@kernel.org>
Reviewed-and-tested-by: default avatarDaniel Gibson <daniel@gibson.sh>
Acked-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Gibson <daniel@gibson.sh>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20220329235810.452513-2-daniel@gibson.sh
Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
parent 857f9713
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