Re: [RFC] [PATCH] cpuset operations causes Badness at mm/slab.c:777 warning

Christoph Lameter
2007-06-01T20:43:19Z

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Paul Jackson wrote:

> > There are no checks necessary. Your function worked fine so far for
> > the case of zero objects with the pointer returned by kmalloc. If the
> > code is correct then it will not dereference the pointer to the zero
> > sized array. If not then we may find a bug and fix it.
>
> I suspect you got lucky. The check for a full pidarray[] in the routine
> pid_array_load() occurs -after- a pid is put in the array. If a task
> showed up in this cpuset at the wrong time, we would fall over and die
> in the code:

Then you are deferencing an element in the pidarray that you did not
allocate! This is a bug in cpuset code. So we would need to allocate at
mininum one array element? Or would we need to allocate npids + 1 to be
safe???

---
kernel/cpuset.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Index: linux-2.6/kernel/cpuset.c
===================================================================
--- linux-2.6.orig/kernel/cpuset.c 2007-06-01 13:41:24.000000000 -0700
+++ linux-2.6/kernel/cpuset.c 2007-06-01 13:42:08.000000000 -0700
@@ -1741,7 +1741,7 @@ static int cpuset_tasks_open(struct inod
* show up until sometime later on.
*/
npids = atomic_read(&cs->count);
- pidarray = kmalloc(npids * sizeof(pid_t), GFP_KERNEL);
+ pidarray = kmalloc(max(1, npids) * sizeof(pid_t), GFP_KERNEL);
if (!pidarray)
goto err1;