Re: LKML admins (syzbot emails are not delivered)

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:

> On Tue, 16 Jan 2018 09:34:01 +0100
> Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 8:12 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>> >> Outside of the bugs being considered as considered as security issues,
>> >> the bugs syzbot finds are generally things that don't affect anyone in
>> >> practice.  So are very low on the priority of things to get fixed.  
>> 
>> Not sure why are you saying this, but syzbot has found lots of
>> hundreds of use-after-free's, out-of-bounds, information leaks,
>> deadlocks, vm escapes, etc. They have very direct stability and
>> security impact.
>
> Agreed - there may be some UI and presentation issues but it's found some
> really nasty little bugs.

I am not certain it has always really found the bugs it hits.

My experience tends towards a bug report with too little information
in the Oops to guess what went wrong, that I can not reproduce the
issue locally, that the no can reproduce, that was produced on a weird
tree, and with a reporter telling you they are only interested in
testing fixes.

Which is a long way of saying if the UI issues are bad enough the issue
can not be identified in the code I am not certain we have actually
found a bug.

So while I can see lots of potential in syzbot.  I can't say if the it
is greater potential to get bugs fixed or to annoy developers with
complaints they can't do anything about.

Eric