Re: [PATCH v4 1/2] debugfs: fix use-after-free in debugfs_read_file_str()

[Aldo Ariel Panzardo]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2026 at 06:37:40PM +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> Please don't use a LLM to write a changelog text without crediting it :(

To clarify, I did use Claude Code during the process, but only as an
additional reviewer for spelling and grammar, minor rewording, formatting,
and as a sanity check for obvious mistakes.
I wrote the patch and changelog myself, and the technical analysis,
implementation, KASAN testing, reproducer, and verification were all done
by me.
I should have been clearer about that when you asked earlier, apologies.
Given that limited use, would you still prefer that I add an Assisted-by
tag for the LLM in v5?

My background is security research -- I spend most of my time auditing
code for memory safety issues and race conditions, among other things,
which is how I ended up looking at this code after sashiko flagged the
missing RCU protection.

> This is probably not right, don't do loops like this.  Either fail or
> succeed, don't loop.

Agreed.  I'll follow Danilo's guidance from [1] and keep the
implementation simple -- single allocation with GFP_NOWAIT, no retry.

> Again, let's see the real use case here, what is hitting this in
> userspace today and what debugfs kernel files are causing it?

The writable callers in mainline are:

  drivers/interconnect/debugfs-client.c  src_node/dst_node (0600)
  drivers/soundwire/debugfs.c            firmware_file (0200)

I am not aware of this being hit in the field.  The race exists
because the write path uses synchronize_rcu() + kfree() but the
read path does not hold rcu_read_lock().

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/driver-core/DLPDB44JJRGJ.3K6JNS746M7QC@xxxxxxxxxx/

thanks,
Aldo