Re: [git pull] drm fixes

Linus Torvalds
2010-06-07T18:59:12Z

On Mon, 7 Jun 2010, Al Viro wrote:
>
> Ho-hum... Speaking of which, what about leak fixes? There's a long-standing
> in-core inode leak in jffs2; basically, if you fail directory modification
> in symlink() et.al., you get a leaked inode and whinge at umount. Found
> after -rc1, had been there since all the way back (similar bug in creat()
> had been fixed in 2003, mkdir()/mknod()/symlink() were not). Fix sits in
> jffs2-fixes now...

I think a leak that is trivial easily falls under "security issue" as a
potential DoS issue.

On the other hand, if it's not trivially fixed (say it needs big
re-organizing of some locking or refcounting or whatever), and it's a
really slow leak of a pretty small data structure, and is not triggered by
normal users (say, you need to mount a filesystem or it needs some very
specific timing), I think it falls under "we haven't seen in the previous
five years, we might as well make sure the fix is tested in the next merge
window".

So I think it's a judgement call.

> I can simply pull jffs2-fixes into vfs for-next (I need it in there for
> ->evict_inode() series), but I'd obviously prefer to just rebase it after
> it gets into mainline.

I seem to have a jffs2 pull request that I haven't yet processed, exactly
because it wasn't clear. It's much bigger than I would have wished for,
and it's not clear it's all regressions at all.

DavidW? It's

7 files changed, 107 insertions(+), 91 deletions(-)

and while that's in the size range that I didn't just reject it like the
drm pull, I still do want to know if that's really just true major
bugfixes and regressions. We already had a really bad -rc2 release due to
a tiny and innocent-looking bugfix that turned out to be anything but. I
do _not_ want to repeat that with -rc3, since I'll be gone.

Linus