Re: [PATCH] trace: propagate registration failure from tracing_start_*_record()

[Steven Rostedt]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:08:42 +0530
Yash Suthar <yashsuthar983@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello Steven,
> Thank you for taking a look and really sorry.
> 
> I did use ai assistance for commit message, but I reviewed, modified
> and tested(with syzbot locally) the code myself. I should have
> disclosed really sorry.
> 
> One thing I want to know (or I am still missing something):
> sched_cmdline_ref is incremented before tracing_sched_register() and
> register fails,  but sched_cmdline_ref stays at 1 and on disable
> tracepoint_remove_func() sees NULL and return error (as syzbot
> reported and reproduce also locally).
> your suggestion WARN_ONCE correctly flags the upstream failure, but
> the secondary WARN at  tracepoint.c:358 will still fire on the next
> disable, since the refcount desync isn't addressed. Was that
> intentional ?

Yes.

This is why I'm not too thrilled about syzbot injecting kmalloc
failures. These injections are for one page or less, in which case the
system is in pretty much a failed state anyway.

I don't care about warnings being triggering due to kmalloc failures.
I'll fix UAF or NULL pointer dereferences, but warnings? No!

If you fail to alloc a single page, expect a lot of warnings to happen.
That is intentional. syzbot should not flag an error for a warning that
was triggered due to a single page memory failure, unless that memory
was allocated by in atomic or something where it can't do reclaim.

-- Steve