Re: [PATCH 169/190] Revert "atl1e: checking the status of atl1e_write_phy_reg"

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 03:00:44PM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> This reverts commit ff07d48d7bc0974d4f96a85a4df14564fb09f1ef.
> 
> Commits from @umn.edu addresses have been found to be submitted in "bad
> faith" to try to test the kernel community's ability to review "known
> malicious" changes.  The result of these submissions can be found in a
> paper published at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
> entitled, "Open Source Insecurity: Stealthily Introducing
> Vulnerabilities via Hypocrite Commits" written by Qiushi Wu (University
> of Minnesota) and Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota).
> 
> Because of this, all submissions from this group must be reverted from
> the kernel tree and will need to be re-reviewed again to determine if
> they actually are a valid fix.  Until that work is complete, remove this
> change to ensure that no problems are being introduced into the
> codebase.
> 
> Cc: Kangjie Lu <kjlu@xxxxxxx>
> Cc: David S. Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atl1e/atl1e_main.c | 4 +---
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atl1e/atl1e_main.c b/drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atl1e/atl1e_main.c
> index ff9f96de74b8..85f9cb769e30 100644
> --- a/drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atl1e/atl1e_main.c
> +++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/atl1e/atl1e_main.c
> @@ -455,9 +455,7 @@ static void atl1e_mdio_write(struct net_device *netdev, int phy_id,
>  {
>  	struct atl1e_adapter *adapter = netdev_priv(netdev);
>  
> -	if (atl1e_write_phy_reg(&adapter->hw,
> -				reg_num & MDIO_REG_ADDR_MASK, val))
> -		netdev_err(netdev, "write phy register failed\n");
> +	atl1e_write_phy_reg(&adapter->hw, reg_num & MDIO_REG_ADDR_MASK, val);
>  }
>  
>  static int atl1e_mii_ioctl(struct net_device *netdev,
> -- 
> 2.31.1
> 

The original change here is a mess, what is a user supposed to do if
this call fails?  I will revert it and properly pass the error value up
to the callers, as that is the correct thing to do here, not paper over
the issue with a commit message that claims this change "fixes"
anything.

thanks,

greg k-h