Re: dangers of bots on the mailing lists was Re: divide error in ___bpf_prog_run

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 12:09:18PM +0100, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 10:49 AM, Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net> wrote:
> > Don't know if there's such a possibility, but it would be nice if we could
> > target fuzzing for specific subsystems in related subtrees directly (e.g.
> > for bpf in bpf and bpf-next trees as one example). Dmitry?
> 
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> It's doable.
> Let's start with one bpf tree. Will it be bpf or bpf-next? Which one
> contains more ongoing work? What's the exact git repo address/branch,
> so that I don't second guess?

As a suggestion, until the bpf subsystem is free from problems that
can be found by Syzkaller in Linus's upstream tree, maybe it's not
worth trying to test individual subsystem trees such as the bpf tree?
After all, there's no point trying to bisect our way checking to see
if the problem is with a newly added commit in a development tree, if
it turns out the problem was first introduced years ago in the 4.1 or
3.19 timeframe.

After all, finding these older problems is going to have much higher
value, since these are the sorts of potential security problems that
are worth backporting to real device kernels for Android/ChromeOS, and
for enterprise distro kernels.  So from an "impact to the industry"
perspective, focusing on Linus's tree is going to be far more
productive.  That's a win for the community, and it's a win for those
people on the Syzkaller team who might be going up for promo or
listing their achievements at performance review time.  :-)

This will also give the Syzkaller team more time to make the
automation more intelligent in terms of being able to do the automatic
bisection to find the first guilty commit, labelling the report with
the specific subsystem tree that that it came from, etc., etc.

Cheers,

						- Ted

P.S.  Something that might be *really* interesting is for those cases
where Syzkaller can find a repro, to test that repro on various stable
4.4, 4.9, 3.18, et. al. LTS kernels.  This will take less resources
than a full bisection, but it will add real value since knowledge that
it will trigger on a LTS kernel will help prioritize which reports
developers might be more interested in focusing upon, and it will give
them a head start in determining which fixes needed to be backported
to which stable kernels.