[PATCH] vsprintf: Do not break early boot with probing addresses

[Petr Mladek]

On Fri 2019-05-10 14:07:09, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> On (05/09/19 21:47), Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >    [ Sorry about html and mobile crud, I'm not at the computer right now ]
> >    How about we just undo the whole misguided probe_kernel_address() thing?
> 
> But the problem will remain - %pS/%pF on PPC (and some other arch-s)
> do dereference_function_descriptor(), which calls probe_kernel_address().
> So if probe_kernel_address() starts to dump_stack(), then we are heading
> towards stack overflow. Unless I'm totally missing something.

That is true. On the other hand, %pS/%pF uses
dereference_function_descriptor() only on three architectures.
And these modifiers are used only rarely (ok, in dump_stack()
but still).

On the other hand, any infinite loop in vsprintf() via
probe_kernel_address() would break any printk(). And would be
hard to debug.

I tend to agree with Linus. probe_kernel_address() is too complicated.
It is prone to these infinite loops and should not be used in
the default printk() path.

It would be nice to have a lightweight and safe alternative. But
I can't find any. And I think that it is not worth any huge
complexity. It was just a nice to have idea...


I am going to send a patch replacing probe_kernel_address() with
a simple check:

	if ((unsigned long)ptr < PAGE_SIZE || IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr))
		return "(efault)";

The original patch still makes sense because it adds the check
into more locations and replaces some custom variants.

Best Regards,
Petr