Re: [PATCH] vsprintf: Do not break early boot with probing addresses

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Steve,

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 8:37 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 May 2019 11:02:17 +0200
> Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 10:29 AM David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > And I like Steven's "(fault)" idea.
> > > > How about this:
> > > >
> > > >       if ptr < PAGE_SIZE              -> "(null)"
> > > >       if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr)            -> "(fault)"
> > > >
> > > >       -ss
> > >
> > > Or:
> > >         if (ptr < PAGE_SIZE)
> > >                 return ptr ? "(null+)" : "(null)";
>
> Hmm, that is useful.
>
> > >         if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr)
> > >                 return "(errno)"
>
> I still prefer "(fault)" as is pretty much all I would expect from a
> pointer dereference, even if it is just bad parsing of, say, a parsing
> an MAC address. "fault" is generic enough. "errno" will be confusing,
> because that's normally a variable not a output.
>
> >
> > Do we care about the value? "(-E%u)"?
>
> That too could be confusing. What would (-E22) be considered by a user
> doing an sprintf() on some string. I know that would confuse me, or I
> would think that it was what the %pX displayed, and wonder why it
> displayed it that way. Whereas "(fault)" is quite obvious for any %p
> use case.

I would immediately understand there's a missing IS_ERR() check in a
function that can return  -EINVAL, without having to add a new printk()
to find out what kind of bogus value has been received, and without
having to reboot, and trying to reproduce...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds