On Thu, 2017-09-28 at 00:41 +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote: > Drivers that use the start method for netlink dumping rely on dumpit > not > being called if start fails. For example, ila_xlat.c allocates memory > and assigns it to cb->args[0] in its start() function. It might fail > to > do that and return -ENOMEM instead. However, even when returning an > error, dumpit will be called, which, in the example above, quickly > dereferences the memory in cb->args[0], which will OOPS the kernel. > This > is but one example of how this goes wrong. > > Since start() has always been a function with an int return type, it > therefore makes sense to use it properly, rather than ignoring it. > This > patch thus returns early and does not call dumpit() when start() > fails. > > Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <ja...@zx2c4.com>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Berg <johan...@sipsolutions.net> FWIW, I found another (indirect, via genetlink, like ila_xlat.c) in- tree user that cares and expects the correct failure behaviour: net/ipv6/seg6.c .start = seg6_genl_dumphmac_start, which can also have memory allocation failures. No others appear to exist, afaict. Either way, perhaps it's worth sending this to stable for that reason. johannes