On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 08:51:42AM +0530, Srikanth Korangala Hari wrote: > > Thanks for the patch! Do you have a reproducer or is this theoretical? > > This will affect if it should go to stable or not. > > Dear Luis, this is theoretical as I observed in most of the call's to api - "proc_mkdir" the NULL check is being done. Hence I thought of adding one here. Realistically, if you get allocation failures that early in the boot, oops is the least of your problems - it won't get through mounting the root or lauching init (or unpacking initramfs, etc.) Sure, might as well check it there - nothing wrong with that, but do keep in mind that * it's very certain to end up in panic() very shortly afterwards, no matter what * the odds of exhausting memory (and that would be extremely low-memory setup) precisely at that point (i.e. even getting to proc_root_init()) are not high. Might be interesting to try lower and lower mem=... values passed to the kernel in attempt to step into this one; I wouldn't put large odds on being able to hit precisely that place, but it would be educational anyway.
