[PATCH] perf cpumap: Fix buffer overflow in cpu_map__snprint()

From: Tianchen Ding

Date: Thu Jun 11 2026 - 05:43:48 EST


When SMT is disabled on a large-core-count ARM64 system (e.g., 192
cores), the online CPU list becomes a long sequence of non-contiguous
even numbers (0,2,4,...,382) that cannot be range-compressed. This
string can far exceed the 128-byte stack buffer used by callers like
evlist__warn_user_requested_cpus().

The root cause is that snprintf() returns the number of characters that
*would* have been written if the buffer were large enough, not the
actual number written. When the cumulative return value 'ret' exceeds
'size', the expression 'size - ret' wraps around to a huge value
(since both are size_t / unsigned), causing subsequent snprintf() calls
to write far beyond the buffer boundary, corrupting the stack canary
and resulting in:

WARNING: A requested CPU in '1' is not supported by PMU 'cpu' (CPUs
0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44,46,48,50,
52,54,56,58,60,62,64,66,68,70,72,74,76,78,80,82,84,86,) for event 'cycles'
*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated
Aborted (core dumped)

Fix this by adding a bounds check at the top of the loop: once ret
reaches or exceeds size, stop appending. This follows the same pattern
as snprintf() itself - the returned value may exceed size to indicate
truncation occurred, but no out-of-bounds write will happen.

Signed-off-by: Tianchen Ding <dtcccc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
tools/perf/util/cpumap.c | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c b/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
index 21fa781b03cc..8328f18b7a84 100644
--- a/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
+++ b/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
@@ -680,6 +680,9 @@ size_t cpu_map__snprint(struct perf_cpu_map *map, char *buf, size_t size)
struct perf_cpu cpu = { .cpu = INT16_MAX };
bool last = i == (int)perf_cpu_map__nr(map);

+ if (ret >= size)
+ break;
+
if (!last)
cpu = perf_cpu_map__cpu(map, i);

--
2.39.3