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Date:   Thu, 15 Sep 2022 14:33:40 -0700
From:   Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To:     Eliav Farber <farbere@amazon.com>
Cc:     <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>, <yangyicong@hisilicon.com>,
        <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        <andriy.shevchenko@intel.com>, <hhhawa@amazon.com>,
        <jonnyc@amazon.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] libfs: fix error format in simple_attr_write()
Message-Id: <20220915143340.eeb3a8ca0bf50df1cd6359f9@linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20220915091544.42767-1-farbere@amazon.com>
References: <20220915091544.42767-1-farbere@amazon.com>
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On Thu, 15 Sep 2022 09:15:44 +0000 Eliav Farber <farbere@amazon.com> wrote:

> In commit 488dac0c9237 ("libfs: fix error cast of negative value in
> simple_attr_write()"), simple_attr_write() was changed to use kstrtoull()
> instead of simple_strtoll() to convert a string got from a user.
> A user trying to set a negative value will get an error.
> 
> This is wrong since it breaks all the places that use
> DEFINE_DEBUGFS_ATTRIBUTE() with format of a signed integer.
> 
> For the record there are 43 current users of signed integer which are
> likely to be effected by this:
> 
> $ git grep -n -A1 -w DEFINE_DEBUGFS_ATTRIBUTE | grep ');' |
> sed 's,.*\(".*%.*"\).*,\1,' | sort | uniq -c
>   1 "%08llx\n"
>   5 "0x%016llx\n"
>   5 "0x%02llx\n"
>   5 "0x%04llx\n"
>  13 "0x%08llx\n"
>   1 "0x%4.4llx\n"
>   3 "0x%.4llx\n"
>   4 "0x%llx\n"
>   1 "%1lld\n"
>  40 "%lld\n"
>   2 "%lli\n"
> 129 "%llu\n"
>   1 "%#llx\n"
>   2 "%llx\n"
> 
> u64 is not an issue for negative numbers.
> The %lld and %llu in any case are for 64-bit value, representing it as
> unsigned simplifies the generic code, but it doesn't mean we can't keep
> their signed value if we know that.
> 
> This change uses sscanf() to fix the problem since it does the conversion
> based on the supplied format string.
> 
> Fixes: 488dac0c9237 ("libfs: fix error cast of negative value in simple_attr_write()")

488dac0c9237 was two years ago, so I'm assuming that this error isn't
causing a lot of trouble out there.

In which I may be totally wrong.  Do you see a reason for backporting
this fix into earlier kernels?  If so, what is it?

Thanks.