Re: [PATCH 16/16] mm/sl[au]b: check if large object is valid in __ksize()

[Christoph Lameter]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2022, Marco Elver wrote:

> We shouldn't crash, so it should be WARN(), but also returning
> PAGE_SIZE is bad. The intuition behind returning 0 is to try and make
> the buggy code cause less harm to the rest of the kernel.
>
> >From [1]:
>
> > Similarly, if you are able to tell if the passed pointer is not a
> > valid object some other way, you can do something better - namely,
> > return 0. The intuition here is that the caller has a pointer to an
> > invalid object, and wants to use ksize() to determine its size, and
> > most likely access all those bytes. Arguably, at that point the kernel
> > is already in a degrading state. But we can try to not let things get
> > worse by having ksize() return 0, in the hopes that it will stop
> > corrupting more memory. It won't work in all cases, but should avoid
> > things like "s = ksize(obj); touch_all_bytes(obj, s)" where the size
> > bounds the memory accessed corrupting random memory.

"in the hopes that it will stop corrupting memory"!!!???

Do a BUG() then and definitely stop all chances of memory corruption.