Re: [GIT PULL] pstore updates for v6.6-rc1

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Aug 28 2023 - 19:58:43 EST


On Mon, 28 Aug 2023 at 11:21, Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Please pull these pstore updates for v6.6-rc1. This contains a fair bit
> of code _removal_ which is always nice.

Hmm. The diffstat certainly looks good, but the end result isn't great..

I now get 124 lines of

pstore: zlib_inflate() failed, ret = -5!

in my bootup dmesg.

Considering that there's no reason for pstore to even be active on
this machine, I think it's because pstore now goes and tries to
uncompress something entirely invalid.

The message itself does not seem to be new, but with the switch from
the crypto code, it apparently used to be

crypto_comp_decompress failed, ret = %d!

but the key word here is *apparently*. I never got that message
before. So something else has changed, and I'm thinking that the old
code probably didn't even try to decompress the bogus data it found?

I dunno. But 124 lines of insane garbage in the kernel messages is not
a good thing.

Linus