Skip to content
Commit 559d4c6a authored by Thomas Weißschuh's avatar Thomas Weißschuh Committed by Joel Granados
Browse files

sysctl: avoid spurious permanent empty tables



The test if a table is a permanently empty one, inspects the address of
the registered ctl_table argument.
However as sysctl_mount_point is an empty array and does not occupy and
space it can end up sharing an address with another object in memory.
If that other object itself is a "struct ctl_table" then registering
that table will fail as it's incorrectly recognized as permanently empty.

Avoid this issue by adding a dummy element to the array so that is not
empty anymore.
Explicitly register the table with zero elements as otherwise the dummy
element would be recognized as a sentinel element which would lead to a
runtime warning from the sysctl core.

While the issue seems not being encountered at this time, this seems
mostly to be due to luck.
Also a future change, constifying sysctl_mount_point and root_table, can
reliably trigger this issue on clang 18.

Given that empty arrays are non-standard in the first place it seems
prudent to avoid them if possible.

Fixes: 4a7b29f6 ("sysctl: move sysctl type to ctl_table_header")
Fixes: a35dd3a7 ("sysctl: drop now unnecessary out-of-bounds check")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Weißschuh <linux@weissschuh.net>
Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/oe-lkp/202408051453.f638857e-lkp@intel.com


Signed-off-by: default avatarJoel Granados <j.granados@samsung.com>
parent 5be63fc1
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
0% Loading or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment