Re: [PATCH] usertools/pmdinfo: fix search for PMD info string

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 06:53:20PM +0100, David Marchand wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 at 13:49, Bruce Richardson
> <bruce.richardson@intel.com> wrote:
> >
> > The PMD_INFO_STRING constant string is not guaranteed to appear in the
> > output binary immediately after an unprintable character. Because of
> > this, in some cases the information for a driver could be missed by the
> > PMD info script as it only checks for the prefix at the start of strings
> > that it finds. Change the script to use "s.find()" rather than
> > "s.startswith()" to fix this issue.
> >
> > Fixes: 0ce3cf4afd04 ("usertools/pmdinfo: rewrite simpler script")
> > Cc: stable@dpdk.org
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
> 
> Surprising we hit this issue only now.

Agreed. Two thoughts here:
1. are the compilers normally arranging the data in ways that nearly
guarantee that the strings are not prefixed by other printable data?
2. if we were missing a couple of drivers from dpdk-pmdinfo, would it
really be noticed? Even in the reported case, there were actually 3 missing
driver listings, but only one was actually noticed.

I'd suspect #2 myself. :-)

> Acked-by: David Marchand <david.marchand@redhat.com>
> 
> It would be good to hear back from the initial reporter.
> 
Agreed. I'd like independent confirmation that this fixes the issue on RHEL
9 as reported.

/Bruce