On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 05:31:47PM +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote:
> On Mon Sep 23, 2024 at 12:26 PM EEST, Herbert Xu wrote:
> > > +
> > > > + err = rng->read(rng, buffer, size, wait);
> > > > + if (WARN_ON_ONCE(err > 0 && err > size))
> > >
> > > Are you sure you want to use WARN_ON_ONCE here instead of
> > > pr_warn_once()? I.e. is it worth of taking down the whole
> > > kernel?
> >
> > Absolutely. If this triggers it's a serious kernel bug and we
> > should gather as much information as possible. pr_warn_once is
> > not the same thing as WARN_ON_ONCE in terms of what it prints.
>
> Personally I allow the use of WARN only as the last resort.
>
> If you need stack printout you can always use dump_stack().
>
> >
> > If people want to turn WARNs into BUGs, then they've only got
> > themselves to blame when the kernel goes down. On the other
> > hand perhaps they *do* want this to panic and we should hand
> > it to them.
>
> Actually when you turn on "panic_on_warn" the user expectation is and
> should be that the sites where WARN is used have been hand picked with
> consideration so that panic happens for a reason.
>
> This has also been denoted repeatedly by Greg:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/2024061828-CVE-2024-36975-6719@gregkh/
>
> I should check this somewhere but actually these days a wrongly chosen
> WARN() might lead to CVE entry. That fix was by me but I never created
> the CVE.
>
> Greg, did we have something under Documentation/ that would fully
> address the use of WARN?
Please see:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/deprecated.html#bug-and-bug-on
which describes that. We should make it more explicit that any WARN()
or WARN_ON() calls that can be hit by user interactions somehow, will
end up getting a CVE id when we fix it up to not do so.
thanks,
greg k-h
