Re: WTF: patch "[PATCH] SUNRPC: drop pointless static qualifier in" was seriously submitted to be applied to the 4.19-stable tree?

J. Bruce Fields
2018-11-20T03:27:45Z

On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 01:45:19PM +0100, gregkh@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
> The patch below was submitted to be applied to the 4.19-stable tree.
>
> I fail to see how this patch meets the stable kernel rules as found at
> Documentation/process/stable-kernel-rules.rst.

I should have rewritten that changelog, Yue Hainbing's makes it just
sound like cleanup.

That variable should definitely be private to each task, the sharing
could cause real bugs.

Admittedly, I don't have actual bug reports, so you could argue this
falls under the 'No "theoretical race condition"' rule, but the
potential consequences are pretty bad and the fix very simple, so I
still think it's a good stable candidate.

--b.

> I could be totally wrong, and if so, please respond to
> <stable@vger.kernel.org> and let me know why this patch should be
> applied. Otherwise, it is now dropped from my patch queues, never to be
> seen again.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>
> ------------------ original commit in Linus's tree ------------------
>
> From 025911a5f4e36955498ed50806ad1b02f0f76288 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: YueHaibing <yuehaibing@huawei.com>
> Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2018 02:04:57 +0000
> Subject: [PATCH] SUNRPC: drop pointless static qualifier in
> xdr_get_next_encode_buffer()
>
> There is no need to have the '__be32 *p' variable static since new value
> always be assigned before use it.
>
> Signed-off-by: YueHaibing <yuehaibing@huawei.com>
> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
> Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>
>
> diff --git a/net/sunrpc/xdr.c b/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
> index 5cfb9e0a18dc..f302c6eb8779 100644
> --- a/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
> +++ b/net/sunrpc/xdr.c
> @@ -546,7 +546,7 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(xdr_commit_encode);
> static __be32 *xdr_get_next_encode_buffer(struct xdr_stream *xdr,
> size_t nbytes)
> {
> - static __be32 *p;
> + __be32 *p;
> int space_left;
> int frag1bytes, frag2bytes;
>
>