[PATCH] driver core: reject devices with unregistered buses

Johan Hovold
2026-04-27T10:30:28Z

Trying to register a device on a bus which has not yet been registered
used to trigger a NULL-pointer dereference, but since the const bus
structure rework registration instead succeeds without the device being
added to the bus.

Reject devices with unregistered buses to catch any callers that get
the ordering wrong and to handle bus registration failures more
gracefully.

Fixes: 5221b82d46f2 ("driver core: bus: bus_add/probe/remove_device() cleanups")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 6.3
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>
---
drivers/base/bus.c | 11 +++++++++--
1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/base/bus.c b/drivers/base/bus.c
index 8b6722ff8590..d17bd91490ee 100644
--- a/drivers/base/bus.c
+++ b/drivers/base/bus.c
@@ -544,10 +544,10 @@ static const struct attribute_group driver_override_dev_group = {
*/
int bus_add_device(struct device *dev)
{
- struct subsys_private *sp = bus_to_subsys(dev->bus);
+ struct subsys_private *sp;
int error;

- if (!sp) {
+ if (!dev->bus) {
/*
* This is a normal operation for many devices that do not
* have a bus assigned to them, just say that all went
@@ -556,6 +556,13 @@ int bus_add_device(struct device *dev)
return 0;
}

+ sp = bus_to_subsys(dev->bus);
+ if (!sp) {
+ pr_err("%s: cannot add device '%s' to unregistered bus '%s'\n",
+ __func__, dev_name(dev), dev->bus->name);
+ return -EINVAL;
+ }
+
/*
* Reference in sp is now incremented and will be dropped when
* the device is removed from the bus
--
2.53.0