WARN_ON out of range error in ERR_PTR?

From: Benny Halevy
Date: Wed Nov 26 2008 - 10:48:26 EST


Andrew,

After hitting a bug where an nfs error -10021 wasn't handled
correctly since IS_ERR returned false on its ERR_PTR value
I realized that adding a BUG_ON to make sure the mapped error
is in the valid range would have caught this.

Since ERR_PTR is not called on the critical path
(unlike IS_ERR) but rather on the error handling path I believe
we can tolerate the extra cost.

The reason this is just a WARN_ON and not BUG_ON is to make
fixing it easier, although I do consider calling ERR_PTR on an
out of range error a pretty dangerous bug as the error might go
unnoticed.

How about committing the following patch to -mm?

Signed-off-by: Benny Halevy <bhalevy@xxxxxxxxxxx>
---
include/linux/err.h | 3 ++-
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/linux/err.h b/include/linux/err.h
index ec87f31..81df84f 100644
--- a/include/linux/err.h
+++ b/include/linux/err.h
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
#define _LINUX_ERR_H

#include <linux/compiler.h>
-
+#include <asm/bug.h>
#include <asm/errno.h>

/*
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@

static inline void *ERR_PTR(long error)
{
+ WARN_ON(error && !IS_ERR_VALUE(error));
return (void *) error;
}

--
1.6.0.2

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