Re: [PATCH] mtd: nand: raw: qcom_nandc: handle error pointer from adm prep_slave_sg

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2022, at 2:10 AM, Christian Marangi wrote:
> ADM dma engine has changed to also provide error pointer instaed of
> plain NULL pointer on invalid configuration of prep_slave_sg function.
> Currently this is not handled and an error pointer is detected as a
> valid dma_desc. This cause kernel panic as the driver doesn't fail
> with an invalid dma engine configuration.
>
> Correctly handle this case by checking if dma_desc is NULL or IS_ERR.

Using IS_ERR_OR_NULL() is almost never a correct solution. I think
in this case the problem is the adm_prep_slave_sg() function
that returns an invalid error code.

While error pointers are often better than NULL pointers for
passing information to the caller, a driver can't just change
the calling conventions on its own. If we want to change
the dmaengine_prep_slave_sg() API, I would suggest coming
up with a new name for a replacement interface that uses
error pointers instead of NULL first, and then changing
all callers to the new interface.

       Arnd