Re: [PATCH][RESEND] mm: Fix off-by-one bug in print_nodes_state

From: David Rientjes
Date: Sun Dec 18 2011 - 17:44:28 EST


On Sun, 18 Dec 2011, Ryota Ozaki wrote:

> /sys/devices/system/node/{online,possible} involve a garbage byte
> because print_nodes_state returns content size + 1. To fix the bug,
> the patch changes the use of cpuset_sprintf_cpulist to follow the
> use at other places, which is clearer and safer.
>

It's not a garbage byte, sysdev files use a buffer created with
get_zeroed_page(), so extra byte is guaranteed to be zero since
nodelist_scnprintf() won't write to it. So the issue here is that
print_nodes_state() returns a size that is off by one according to
ISO C99 although it won't cause a problem in practice.

> This bug was introduced since v2.6.24.
>

It's not a bug, the result of a 4-node system would be "0-3\n\0" and
returns 5 correctly. You can verify this very simply with strace.
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