Hi, I've a question for you :). How could this patch help: commit 7032269e87ade34cc12891675371fa2ac150a620 Author: Chris Ball <cjb@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu Aug 12 19:07:40 2010 -0400 HID: hiddev: protect against disconnect/NULL-dereference race One of our users reports consistently hitting a NULL dereference that resolves to the "hid_to_usb_dev(hid);" call in hiddev_ioctl(), when disconnecting a Lego WeDo USB HID device from an OLPC XO running Scratch software. There's a FIXME comment and a guard against the dereference, but that happens farther down the function than the initial dereference does. This patch moves the call to be below the guard, and the user reports that it fixes the problem for him. OLPC bug report: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10174 Signed-off-by: Chris Ball <cjb@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@xxxxxxx> when the code now looks like: struct usb_device *dev; // here was the assignment before the patch struct usbhid_device *usbhid = hid->driver_data; ... if (!hiddev->exist || !hid) return -EIO; dev = hid_to_usb_dev(hid); If hid was ever NULL at this phase, the check couldn't improve anything due to hid->driver_data dereference being still before the check. So again my question, how this could change anything? Above that, it just makes the window shorter, but the bug is still there, isn't it? Is the following scenario reasonable? A (hiddev_ioctl) | B ------------------------------------------------ if (!hid) | return -EIO; | | hid = NULL | kfree(hid); dev = hid_to_usb_dev(hid); | Actually who's the process B you are trying to catch the race against by the patch? hid-core? thanks, -- js suse labs -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-input" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html