Re: [PATCH 0/2] mm: Two small fixes for recent syzbot reports

Dmitry Vyukov
2020-04-14T12:05:40Z

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 1:59 PM Qian Cai <cai@lca.pw> wrote:
> > On Apr 14, 2020, at 7:13 AM, Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > How do these use-after-free's and locking bugs get past the
> > unit-testing systems (which syzbot is not) and remain unnoticed for so
> > long?...
> > syzbot uses the dumbest VMs (GCE), so everything it triggers during
> > boot should be triggerable pretty much everywhere.
>
> There are many reasons that any early testing would not be able to catch ALL the syzbot blockers.
>
> The Kconfigs are different. For example, I don’t have openvswitch enabled, so would miss that ovs rcu-list lockdep warning. Same for that use-after-free in net/bluetooth and a warning in sound subsystem.
>
> But, notifying Linux-next ML is a good start, so at least we could ask Paul or Steve to pull out the commit which enabling rcu-list debugging by default with PROVE_RCU.
>
> I learned through that restricted kconfig to some degree of minimal could save a lot of troubles late on especially those options that I have no way to exercise like net/bluetooth and sound currently. It is going to be extra works though because those default options in Linux-next or even defconfigs are not always pleasant and would want to enable something I don’t need if not given human intervention.

We only try to enable what we can reach. There is significant reach
for sound and net/bluetooth even without any hardware. So I would
assume generic testing systems like KernelCI, LKFT, CKI should enable
these as well. Hopefully we don't have all of the sound and
net/bluetooth completely untested in linux-next.