Re: [PATCH] s390: Warn if kernel command line contains non-printable EBCDIC characters

From: Ilya Leoshkevich

Date: Wed Aug 26 2026 - 10:09:04 EST




On 8/26/26 15:51, David Laight wrote:
On Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:08:08 +0200
Ilya Leoshkevich <iii@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Users may accidentally add multi-byte UTF-8 characters to zipl.conf
parmline, for example, by copying snippets containing non-breaking
spaces (\xC2\xA0) from web pages.

The kernel will then interpret the entire command line as EBCDIC,
making it unusable. Distinguish this situation from the legitimate
EBCDIC conversion by looking for non-printable characters and issue
a warning.

Would it be better to check for the entire line being printable ebcdic?
All of EBCDIC a-zA-Z0-9 have the 0x80 bit set and most of 0x20..0x7f
are invalid or control characters (or punctuation).

David

I actually started with that, but this required introducing a new
_ctype-like table (unfortunately it's not as simple as checking a
couple ranges), so I decided against that and took a shortcut via
ASCII.

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