Re: [PATCH 2/2] debugfs: return error values, not NULL

Greg Kroah-Hartman
2019-01-23T11:55:40Z

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 12:06:28PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed 23-01-19 11:28:14, Greg KH wrote:
> > When an error happens, debugfs should return an error pointer value, not
> > NULL. This will prevent the totally theoretical error where a debugfs
> > call fails due to lack of memory, returning NULL, and that dentry value
> > is then passed to another debugfs call, which would end up succeeding,
> > creating a file at the root of the debugfs tree, but would then be
> > impossible to remove (because you can not remove the directory NULL).
> >
> > So, to make everyone happy, always return errors, this makes the users
> > of debugfs much simpler (they do not have to ever check the return
> > value), and everyone can rest easy.
>
> How come this is safe at all? Say you are creating a directory by
> debugfs_create_dir and then feed the return value to debugfs_create_files
> as a parent. In case of error you are giving it an invalid pointer and
> likely blow up unless I miss something.

debugfs_create_files checks for invalid parents and will just refuse to
create the file. It's always done that.

> I do agree that reporting errors is better than a simple catch all NULL
> but this should have been done when introduced rather than now when most
> callers simply check for NULL as a failure.

I'm fixing up all the "NULL is a failure" callsites in the kernel, see
lkml for the first round of those patches.

thanks,

greg k-h