Re: nios2 crash due to 'init/main.c: extract early boot entropy from the passed cmdline'

From: Daniel Micay
Date: Mon Sep 11 2017 - 14:26:01 EST


On Mon, 2017-09-11 at 10:35 -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 09:36:00AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 8:58 PM, Guenter Roeck <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I noticed that nios2 images crash in mainline. Bisect points to
> > > commit
> > > 33d72f3822d7 ("init/main.c: extract early boot entropy from the
> > > passed
> > > cmdline"). Bisect log is attached.
> > >
> > > As far as I can see, the problem is seen because
> > > add_device_randomness()
> > > calls random_get_entropy(). However, the underlying timer function
> > > used by the nios2 architecture (nios2_timer_read) is not yet
> > > initialized,
> > > causing a NULL pointer access and crash. A sample crash log is at
> > > http://kerneltests.org/builders/qemu-nios2-master/builds/1
> > > 75/steps/qemubuildcommand/logs/stdio
> >
> > Oh, yikes. Do you have a full call trace? (Does this come through
> > get_cycles() or via the It seems like we could either initialize the
> > timer earlier or allow it to fall back when not initialized...
> >
>
> nios2 doesn't give me a traceback. I followed it by adding debug
> messages.
> The code path is through get_cycles().
>
> On nios2:
>
> static u64 nios2_timer_read(struct clocksource *cs)
> {
> struct nios2_clocksource *nios2_cs = to_nios2_clksource(cs);
> unsigned long flags;
> u32 count;
>
> local_irq_save(flags);
> count = read_timersnapshot(&nios2_cs->timer); // <- not
> initialized
> local_irq_restore(flags);
>
> /* Counter is counting down */
> return ~count;
> }
>
> cycles_t get_cycles(void)
> {
> return nios2_timer_read(&nios2_cs.cs);
> }
> EXPORT_SYMBOL(get_cycles);
>
> Guenter

Maybe it should WARN and return 0 for now if that's NULL?