On Wed, 2023-10-11 at 16:43 +0800, 黄思聪 wrote: > Pointer dereference error may occur in "alloc_init_deleg" function. > > The "alloc_init_deleg" function located in "fs/nfsd/nfs4state.c" may occur a pointer dereference error when it calls the function "nfs4_alloc_stid" located in the same kernel file. The "nfs4_alloc_stid" function will call the "kmem_cache_zalloc" function to allocate enough memory for storing the "stid" variable. If there are significant memory fragmentation issues, insufficient free memory blocks, or internal errors in the allocation function, the "kmem_cache_zalloc" function will return NULL. Then the "nfs4_alloc_stid" function will return NULL to the "alloc_init_deleg" function. Finally, the "alloc_init_deleg" function will execute the following instructions. > dp = delegstateid(nfs4_alloc_stid(clp, deleg_slab, nfs4_free_deleg)); > if (dp == NULL) > goto out_dec; > dp->dl_stid.sc_stateid.si_generation = 1; > > The "delegstateid" function is defined as below: > static inline struct nfs4_delegation *delegstateid(struct nfs4_stid *s) > { > return container_of(s, struct nfs4_delegation, dl_stid); > } > > When the parameter "struct nfs4_stid *s" is NULL, the function will return a strange value which is a negative number. The value will be interpreted as a very large number. Then the variable "dp" in the "alloc_init_deleg" function will get the value, and it will pass the following "if" conditional statements. In the last, the variable "dp" will be dereferenced, and it will cause an error. > > My experimental kernel version is "LINUX 6.1", and this problem exists in all the version from "LINUX v3.2-rc1" to "LINUX v6.6-rc5". (I don't think there are security implications here, so I'm cc'ing the mailing list and making this public.) Well spotted! Ordinarily you'd be correct, but dl_stid is the first field in the struct, so the container_of will just return the same value that you pass in. Still, this is not something we ought to rely on going forward. Would you care to make a patch to clean this up and make that a bit less subtle? Thanks! -- Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>