Re: [PATCH] vsprintf: Do not break early boot with probing addresses

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

[ Purple is a nice shade on the bike shed. ;-) ]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 11:02:17 +0200
Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 10:29 AM David Laight <David.Laight@aculab.com> wrote:
> > > And I like Steven's "(fault)" idea.
> > > How about this:
> > >
> > >       if ptr < PAGE_SIZE              -> "(null)"
> > >       if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr)            -> "(fault)"
> > >
> > >       -ss  
> >
> > Or:
> >         if (ptr < PAGE_SIZE)
> >                 return ptr ? "(null+)" : "(null)";

Hmm, that is useful.

> >         if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr)
> >                 return "(errno)"  

I still prefer "(fault)" as is pretty much all I would expect from a
pointer dereference, even if it is just bad parsing of, say, a parsing
an MAC address. "fault" is generic enough. "errno" will be confusing,
because that's normally a variable not a output.

> 
> Do we care about the value? "(-E%u)"?

That too could be confusing. What would (-E22) be considered by a user
doing an sprintf() on some string. I know that would confuse me, or I
would think that it was what the %pX displayed, and wonder why it
displayed it that way. Whereas "(fault)" is quite obvious for any %p
use case.

-- Steve