Re: [PATCH 1/1] mm/slub.c: add a naive detection of double free or corruption

[Christopher Lameter]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2017, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 07:45:07PM +0300, Alexander Popov wrote:
> > Add an assertion similar to "fasttop" check in GNU C Library allocator:
> > an object added to a singly linked freelist should not point to itself.
> > That helps to detect some double free errors (e.g. CVE-2017-2636) without
> > slub_debug and KASAN. Testing with hackbench doesn't show any noticeable
> > performance penalty.
>
> >  {
> > +	BUG_ON(object == fp); /* naive detection of double free or corruption */
> >  	*(void **)(object + s->offset) = fp;
> >  }
>
> Is BUG() the best response to this situation?  If it's a corruption, then
> yes, but if we spot a double-free, then surely we should WARN() and return
> without doing anything?

The double free debug checking already does the same thing in a more
thourough way (this one only checks if the last free was the same
address). So its duplicating a check that already exists. However, this
one is always on.