Re: LKML admins (syzbot emails are not delivered)

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Date: Wed Jan 24 2018 - 12:32:30 EST


On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 11:06:02AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Alan Cox <gnomes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On Tue, 16 Jan 2018 09:34:01 +0100
> > Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 8:12 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> >> Outside of the bugs being considered as considered as security issues,
> >> >> the bugs syzbot finds are generally things that don't affect anyone in
> >> >> practice. So are very low on the priority of things to get fixed.
> >>
> >> Not sure why are you saying this, but syzbot has found lots of
> >> hundreds of use-after-free's, out-of-bounds, information leaks,
> >> deadlocks, vm escapes, etc. They have very direct stability and
> >> security impact.
> >
> > Agreed - there may be some UI and presentation issues but it's found some
> > really nasty little bugs.
>
> I am not certain it has always really found the bugs it hits.
>
> My experience tends towards a bug report with too little information
> in the Oops to guess what went wrong, that I can not reproduce the
> issue locally, that the no can reproduce, that was produced on a weird
> tree, and with a reporter telling you they are only interested in
> testing fixes.
>
> Which is a long way of saying if the UI issues are bad enough the issue
> can not be identified in the code I am not certain we have actually
> found a bug.
>
> So while I can see lots of potential in syzbot. I can't say if the it
> is greater potential to get bugs fixed or to annoy developers with
> complaints they can't do anything about.

I'm with Alan here, syzbot has found lots of nasty bugs in the areas of
the kernel I maintain. Many of which are still on my TODO list to fix :)

So yes, it's annoying to me at times as well, but it is good work here,
and I hope to see it continue.

greg k-h