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

Sergey Senozhatsky sergey.senozhatsky.work at gmail.com
Tue May 14 12:07:30 AEST 2019


On (05/13/19 14:42), Petr Mladek wrote:
> > The "(null)" is good enough by itself and already an established
> > practice..
> 
> (efault) made more sense with the probe_kernel_read() that
> checked wide range of addresses. Well, I still think that
> it makes sense to distinguish a pure NULL. And it still
> used also for IS_ERR_VALUE().

Wouldn't anything within first PAGE_SIZE bytes be reported as
a NULL deref?

       char *p = (char *)(PAGE_SIZE - 2);
       *p = 'a';

gives

 kernel: BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address = 0000000000000ffe
 kernel: #PF: supervisor-privileged write access from kernel code
 kernel: #PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page


And I like Steven's "(fault)" idea.
How about this:

	if ptr < PAGE_SIZE		-> "(null)"
	if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr)		-> "(fault)"

	-ss


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