Re: [PATCH] perf cpumap: Fix buffer overflow in cpu_map__snprint()

[James Clark <james.clark@linaro.org>]

On 11/06/2026 10:41 am, Tianchen Ding wrote:
> When SMT is disabled on a large-core-count ARM64 system (e.g., 192
> cores), the online CPU list becomes a long sequence of non-contiguous
> even numbers (0,2,4,...,382) that cannot be range-compressed. This
> string can far exceed the 128-byte stack buffer used by callers like
> evlist__warn_user_requested_cpus().
> 
> The root cause is that snprintf() returns the number of characters that
> *would* have been written if the buffer were large enough, not the
> actual number written. When the cumulative return value 'ret' exceeds
> 'size', the expression 'size - ret' wraps around to a huge value
> (since both are size_t / unsigned), causing subsequent snprintf() calls
> to write far beyond the buffer boundary, corrupting the stack canary
> and resulting in:
> 
> WARNING: A requested CPU in '1' is not supported by PMU 'cpu' (CPUs
> 0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36,38,40,42,44,46,48,50,
> 52,54,56,58,60,62,64,66,68,70,72,74,76,78,80,82,84,86,) for event 'cycles'
> *** stack smashing detected ***: terminated
> Aborted (core dumped)
> 
> Fix this by adding a bounds check at the top of the loop: once ret
> reaches or exceeds size, stop appending. This follows the same pattern
> as snprintf() itself - the returned value may exceed size to indicate
> truncation occurred, but no out-of-bounds write will happen.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Tianchen Ding <dtcccc@linux.alibaba.com>
> ---
>   tools/perf/util/cpumap.c | 3 +++
>   1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c b/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
> index 21fa781b03cc..8328f18b7a84 100644
> --- a/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
> +++ b/tools/perf/util/cpumap.c
> @@ -680,6 +680,9 @@ size_t cpu_map__snprint(struct perf_cpu_map *map, char *buf, size_t size)
>   		struct perf_cpu cpu = { .cpu = INT16_MAX };
>   		bool last = i == (int)perf_cpu_map__nr(map);
>   
> +		if (ret >= size)
> +			break;
> +
>   		if (!last)
>   			cpu = perf_cpu_map__cpu(map, i);
>   

I think this covers up the root cause a little bit. It doesn't fix the 
human readable output by adding truncation marks "...", and it 
definitely doesn't help any scripts that are parsing any of this output.

I checked for usages of it, and it is generally used for output but 
whether read by scripts or human we can't know, so we should probably 
make it always output something sane. However, there is one internal use 
in evsel__tpebs_start_perf_record() which uses a very small buffer so 
this might make a visible problem hidden.

It isn't a huge change to replace this with a version that allocates and 
always works. It's not like there's a reason to not allocate, other than 
convenience of writing the code in the first place. At least there are 
only 15 and not 1000 calls to it.

Thanks
James