The use of stack Variable Length Arrays needs to be avoided, as they can be a vector for stack exhaustion, which can be both a runtime bug (kernel Oops) or a security flaw (overwriting memory beyond the stack). Also, in general, as code evolves it is easy to lose track of how big a VLA can get. Thus, we can end up having runtime failures that are hard to debug. As part of the directive[1] to remove all VLAs from the kernel, and build with -Wvla. Currently driver is using a VLA declared using the number of descriptors. This array is used to store integer values and is later used as an argument to `gpiod_set_array_value_cansleep()` This can be avoided by using `kmalloc_array()` to allocate memory for the array of integer values. Memory is free'd before return from function. >From the code it appears that it is safe to sleep so we can use GFP_KERNEL (based _cansleep() suffix of function `gpiod_set_array_value_cansleep()`. It can be expected that this patch will result in a small increase in overhead due to the use of `kmalloc_array()` [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/7/621 Signed-off-by: Tobin C. Harding <me@xxxxxxxx> --- Patch is untested. I was not able to fully grok the call chain involved with this change so was unable to quantify the total degradation of performance. Line calling to gpiod_set_array_value_cansleep() is 83 characters long, patch attempts to leave the code as clean as possible. Open to suggestions for improvement. I tried various forms of while loop and pointer arithmetic for the setting of `values` but in the end settled for array indexing, again open to suggestions. thanks, Tobin. drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq_simple.c | 14 +++++++++----- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq_simple.c b/drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq_simple.c index 13ef162cf066..a8b9fee4d62a 100644 --- a/drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq_simple.c +++ b/drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq_simple.c @@ -40,14 +40,18 @@ static void mmc_pwrseq_simple_set_gpios_value(struct mmc_pwrseq_simple *pwrseq, struct gpio_descs *reset_gpios = pwrseq->reset_gpios; if (!IS_ERR(reset_gpios)) { - int i; - int values[reset_gpios->ndescs]; + int i, *values; + int nvalues = reset_gpios->ndescs; - for (i = 0; i < reset_gpios->ndescs; i++) + values = kmalloc_array(nvalues, sizeof(int), GFP_KERNEL); + if (!values) + return; + + for (i = 0; i < nvalues; i++) values[i] = value; - gpiod_set_array_value_cansleep( - reset_gpios->ndescs, reset_gpios->desc, values); + gpiod_set_array_value_cansleep(nvalues, reset_gpios->desc, values); + kfree(values); } } -- 2.7.4 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-mmc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
