Re: [PATCH] swapfile: avoid NULL pointer dereference in swapon whens_bdev is NULL

From: Hugh Dickins
Date: Thu Oct 01 2009 - 07:53:32 EST


On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Suresh Jayaraman wrote:
>
> Yeah, perhaps. I stumbled upon one more of such error - a NULL pointer
> dereference in blkdev_issue_discard() called from get_swap_page() when I ran
> memhog, a simple program to generate a memory hog with Swap over NFS patches.
>
> The call sequence is add_to_swap() -> get_swap_page() -> scan_swap_map()
> -> discard_swap_cluster() -> blkdev_issue_discard().
>
> Wrapping the code around a NULL check fixes the Oops for me.

That's odd: scan_swap_map() should only discard_swap_cluster() if
SWP_DISCARDABLE got set, and your first patch made sure that it wasn't.

So I don't think this second patch should be necessary: you did have
your first applied when you found this?

I wonder if there's a funny little issue like si->lowest_alloc not
being reset to 0 where it should be. Were you switching between
NFS swap and SSD swap in your testing?

Hugh
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