[BUG] rtl8192se: panic accessing unmapped memory in skb

From: Eric Biggers
Date: Sun Dec 21 2014 - 12:25:28 EST


Hi,

I have a RTL8192SE wireless card, attached via PCI. Usually it works with no
issues, but I recently had a kernel panic occur in the rtl8192se driver. The
kernel version is 3.18. Based on my analysis of the panic dump, the panic was
caused by a memory access violation in this block of code in
rtl92se_rx_query_desc():

if (stats->decrypted) {
hdr = (struct ieee80211_hdr *)(skb->data +
stats->rx_drvinfo_size + stats->rx_bufshift);

if ((_ieee80211_is_robust_mgmt_frame(hdr)) &&
(ieee80211_has_protected(hdr->frame_control)))
rx_status->flag &= ~RX_FLAG_DECRYPTED;
else
rx_status->flag |= RX_FLAG_DECRYPTED;
}

Specifically, the violation occurred the first time hdr->frame_control was
accessed, as part of _ieee80211_is_robust_mgmt_frame().

The panic occurred when the system was under heavy filesystem load but seemingly
is not easily reproducible.

There was recently a NULL check that was removed from this exact place in the
code, but it was certainly useless. Instead, what's much more suspect to me is
that inside _rtl_pci_rx_interrupt(), there is no error checking of the return
value of _rtl_pci_init_one_rxdesc(), which might fail if the skb couldn't be
allocated. I am wondering if this could be causing the problem.

Eric
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