Although it is very unlikely that the allocation during init would
fail any such failure should point to the original cause to allow
easier understanding of the ensuing null-pointer dereference splat.
Signed-off-by: Nicholas Mc Guire <hof...@osadl.org>
---
Problem located with experimental coccinelle script
V2: Russell King <li...@armlinux.org.uk> pointed out that the use of
WARN_ON() would result in a stack trace followed by the oops due
to dereferencing of the NULL pointer and so make it even less
likely that users would uncover the actual cause - so drop the
WARN_ON() and use a short pr_err() message that points to the
oops cause directly.
Note that this will trigger a checkpatch WARNING
"WARNING: Possible unnecessary 'out of memory' message"
but comparing the oops with an without the one-line pr_err I would
argue that it makes sense to include it:
<snip>
[ 8061.514840] shared page allocation failure in hello_init()
[ 8113.563239] BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at
0000000000000000
[ 8113.563250] #PF error: [WRITE]
[ 8113.563255] PGD 8000000129993067 P4D 8000000129993067 PUD 129992067 PMD 0
[ 8113.563267] Oops: 0002 [#1] SMP PTI
[ 8113.563276] CPU: 2 PID: 2656 Comm: bash Tainted: G W O
5.0.0-rc3livepatchtest-next-20190123+ #4
[ 8113.563280] Hardware name: Quanta TWH/TWH, BIOS QU221 10/14/2011
[ 8113.563292] RIP: 0010:foo_store+0x3a/0x90 [hello_chardev]
...
<snip>
Patch was compile-tested: mvebu_v7_defconfig (implies MACH_MVEBU_ANY=y)
(with some unrelated sparse warnings about missing syscalls)
Patch is against 5.1-rc4 (localversion-next is 20190415)
arch/arm/mach-mvebu/board-v7.c | 3 +++
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
diff --git a/arch/arm/mach-mvebu/board-v7.c b/arch/arm/mach-mvebu/board-v7.c
index 0b10acd..df84cb6 100644
--- a/arch/arm/mach-mvebu/board-v7.c
+++ b/arch/arm/mach-mvebu/board-v7.c
@@ -128,6 +128,9 @@ static void __init i2c_quirk(void)
struct property *new_compat;
new_compat = kzalloc(sizeof(*new_compat), GFP_KERNEL);
+ if (!new_compat)
+ pr_err("new_compat allocation failure in %s()\n",
+ __func__);
new_compat->name = kstrdup("compatible", GFP_KERNEL);
new_compat->length = sizeof("marvell,mv78230-a0-i2c");
--
2.1.4
