Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL 6.1 13/22] proc/vmcore: fix potential memory leak in vmcore_init()

Sasha Levin
2022-12-18T11:28:24Z

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 04:32:28PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>On Sat, 17 Dec 2022 10:27:14 -0500 Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> wrote:
>
>> From: Jianglei Nie <niejianglei2021@163.com>
>>
>> [ Upstream commit 12b9d301ff73122aebd78548fa4c04ca69ed78fe ]
>>
>> Patch series "Some minor cleanup patches resent".
>>
>> The first three patches trivial clean up patches.
>>
>> And for the patch "kexec: replace crash_mem_range with range", I got a
>> ibm-p9wr ppc64le system to test, it works well.
>>
>> This patch (of 4):
>>
>> elfcorehdr_alloc() allocates a memory chunk for elfcorehdr_addr with
>> kzalloc(). If is_vmcore_usable() returns false, elfcorehdr_addr is a
>> predefined value. If parse_crash_elf_headers() gets some error and
>> returns a negetive value, the elfcorehdr_addr should be released with
>> elfcorehdr_free().
>
>This is exceedingly minor - a single memory leak per boot, under very
>rare circumstances.
>
>
>With every patch I merge I consider -stable. Often I'll discuss the
>desirability of a backport with the author and with reviewers. Every
>single patch. And then some damn script comes along and overrides that
>quite careful decision. argh.
>
>Can we please do something like
>
> if (akpm && !cc:stable)
> dont_backport()

Yup, I already had it set for 'akpm && mm/ && !cc:stable', happy to
remove the 'mm/' restriction if you're doing the same for the rest of
the patches you review.

>And even go further - if your script thinks it might be something we
>should backport and if it didn't have cc:stable then contact the
>author, reviewers and committers and ask them to reconsider before we
>go and backport it. This approach will have the advantage of training
>people to consider the backport more consistently.

This is what this mail is all about: I haven't queued up the patch yet,
it gives folks week+ to review, and all it takes is a simple "no" for me
to drop it.

>I'd (still) like to have a new patch tag like Not-For-Stable: or
>cc:not-stable or something to tell your scripts "yes, we thought about
>it and we decided no".

No objections on my part.

--
Thanks,
Sasha