Re: [PATCH v3] char: pcmcia: cm4000_cs: Fix use-after-free in cm4000_fops

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023, at 07:51, Jiri Slaby wrote:
> Ping -- what's the status of these?
>
> Should we mark cm4000_cs, cm4040_cs, and scr24x_cs as BROKEN instead?

A few bug fixes ago, I think we had all agreed that the drivers can
just be removed immediately, without a grace period or going through
drivers/staging [1]. We just need someone to send the corresponding
patches.

While looking for those, I see that Dominik also asked the
broader question about PCMCIA drivers in general [2] (sorry
I missed that thread at the time), and Linus just merged my
boardfile removal patches that ended up dropping half of the
(arm32) soc or board specific socket back end drivers.

Among the options that Dominik proposed in that email, I would
prefer we go ahead with b) and remove most of the drivers that
have no known users. I think we can be more aggressive though,
as most of the drivers that are listed as 'some activity in
2020/21/22' seem to only be done to fix the same issues that
were found in ISA or PCI drivers.

The two important use cases that I see for drivers/pcmcia are
cardbus devices on old laptops, which work with normal PCI
device drivers, and CF card storage for embedded systems.
If we can separate the two by moving native cardbus to
drivers/pci/hotplug but drop support for 16-bit PCMCIA
devices in cardbus slots, this will hopefully get a lot
easier.

      Arnd

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/YyLcG1hG5d6D4zNN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/Y07d7rMvd5++85BJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/