On Tue, 2020-06-02 at 14:51 -0700, James Bottomley wrote: > On Tue, 2020-06-02 at 22:07 +0200, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 02, 2020 at 12:54:16PM -0700, James Bottomley wrote: > > [...] > > > I think the only way we can make the failure semantics consistent > > > is to have the kobject_init() ones (so kfree on failure). That > > > means for the add part, the function would have to unwind > > > everything it did from init on so kfree() is still an option. If > > > people agree, then I can produce the patch ... it's just the > > > current drive to transform everyone who's doing kfree() into > > > kobject_put() would become wrong ... > > > > Everyone should be putting their kfree into the kobject release > > anyway, right? > > No, that's the problem ... for a static kobject you can't free it; > and the release path may make assumption which aren't valid depending > on the kobject state. > > > Anyway, let's see your patch before I start to object further :) > > My first thought was "what? I got suckered into creating a patch", > thanks ;-) But now I look, all the error paths do unwind back to the > initial state, so kfree() on error looks to be completely correct. Actually, I spoke too soon. I did another analysis of the syzkaller flow in b8eb718348b8 ("net-sysfs: Fix reference count leak in rx|netdev_queue_add_kobject") and it turns out there is a single piece of state that's not correctly unwound: the kobj->name which, thanks to additions after kobject_init_and_add() was created, is now allocated via kmalloc if it's not a rodata string and is always and freed in kobject_cleanup via kfree_const(). This problem can be fixed by unwinding the name allocation at the end of kobject_init_and_add() ... or it could be unwound in kobject_add_varg, which would also make kobject_add() unwind correctly. The unwind step is to kfree_const(kobj->name); kobj->name = NULL; so it won't interfere if the kobject_put() is called instead of a simple kfree. Would you prefer the unwind in kobject_init_and_add() like the patch below or in kobject_add_varg()? James --- diff --git a/lib/kobject.c b/lib/kobject.c index 65fa7bf70c57..9991baf43d27 100644 --- a/lib/kobject.c +++ b/lib/kobject.c @@ -472,6 +472,10 @@ int kobject_init_and_add(struct kobject *kobj, struct kobj_type *ktype, va_start(args, fmt); retval = kobject_add_varg(kobj, parent, fmt, args); va_end(args); + if (retval && kobj->name) { + kfree_const(kobj->name); + kobj->name = NULL; + } return retval; }