Re: [PATCH] Fix kernel NULL pointer dereference in xen-blkfront

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Tue Mar 03 2009 - 16:59:57 EST


Kris Shannon wrote:
When booting Xen Dom0 on a pre-release 3.2.1 hypervisor the system Oopses on a
"Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference" in xenwatch.

From the backtrace it looks like backend_changed is calling bdget_disk
with a NULL pointer. Checking for NULL and returning ENODEV instead
allows the kernel to boot.

Thanks, applied. (BTW, please cc: me and xen-devel for Xen-related reports.)

Jens: could you pull this; I think this is probably -rc material. This crash just started happening, so I guess its a side-effect of some core kernel change.

The following changes since commit c7241227f61ca6606a7fa3555391360d92bd8d9b:
Jens Axboe (1):
xen/blkfront: use blk_rq_map_sg to generate ring entries

are available in the git repository at:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jeremy/xen.git xen/frontend/blkfront

Kris Shannon (1):
Fix kernel NULL pointer dereference in xen-blkfront

drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c | 2 ++
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)


Thanks,
J

---
drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c | 2 ++
1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c b/drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c
index f2fff5799ddf0fe1b41909b64d606d..3e2ab6d53adaeb70efa12f0a1f33bb 100644
--- a/drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c
+++ b/drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c
@@ -905,6 +905,8 @@ static void backend_changed(struct xenbus_device *dev,
break;

case XenbusStateClosing:
+ if (info->gd == NULL)
+ xenbus_dev_fatal(dev, -ENODEV, "gd is NULL");
bd = bdget_disk(info->gd, 0);
if (bd == NULL)
xenbus_dev_fatal(dev, -ENODEV, "bdget failed");

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