[bug report] firmware: arm_scmi: Add notification callbacks-registration

Dan Carpenter dan.carpenter at oracle.com
Tue Jun 30 13:57:18 EDT 2020


Hello Cristian Marussi,

The patch 5b352c537930: "firmware: arm_scmi: Add notification
callbacks-registration" from Jun 19, 2020, leads to the following
static checker warning:

	drivers/firmware/arm_scmi/notify.c:1267 scmi_register_notifier()
	warn: passing zero to 'PTR_ERR'

drivers/firmware/arm_scmi/notify.c
  1248  static int scmi_register_notifier(const struct scmi_handle *handle,
  1249                                    u8 proto_id, u8 evt_id, u32 *src_id,
  1250                                    struct notifier_block *nb)
  1251  {
  1252          int ret = 0;
  1253          u32 evt_key;
  1254          struct scmi_event_handler *hndl;
  1255          struct scmi_notify_instance *ni;
  1256  
  1257          /* Ensure notify_priv is updated */
  1258          smp_rmb();
  1259          if (unlikely(!handle->notify_priv))
  1260                  return -ENODEV;
  1261          ni = handle->notify_priv;
  1262  
  1263          evt_key = MAKE_HASH_KEY(proto_id, evt_id,
  1264                                  src_id ? *src_id : SRC_ID_MASK);
  1265          hndl = scmi_get_or_create_handler(ni, evt_key);
  1266          if (IS_ERR_OR_NULL(hndl))
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There are a lot of wrong uses of IS_ERR_OR_NULL() in this driver.

When a function returns both NULL and error pointers, then NULL is a
special kind of success.  For example, we could have code which does
"p = get_feature();" and maybe there is an allocation failure, then
get_feature() should return an error pointer and we return that to the
user.

But if the get_feature() is optional and it has been deliberately
disabled by the user with CONFIG_FOO=n then that is *not* an error.  But
we are still not able to return a valid pointer to the feature so it
returns NULL.  The driver should continue to operate without the
optional feature.

  1267                  return PTR_ERR(hndl);

In this situation the scmi_get_or_create_handler() never returns error
pointers.  It's not an optional feature.  It returns NULL on failure.
So that means we return PTR_ERR(NULL) which is zero which means success.
The code should instead a negative error code instead:

	if (!hndl)
		return -EINVAL;

All the uses of IS_ERR_OR_NULL() that I saw were wrong but this is the
only one that caused a user visible bug.

  1268  
  1269          blocking_notifier_chain_register(&hndl->chain, nb);
  1270  
  1271          /* Enable events for not pending handlers */
  1272          if (likely(!IS_HNDL_PENDING(hndl))) {
                    ^^^^^^
The likely/unlikely() annotations should only be used where it afects
benchmarking.  They should all be removed from this driver.

  1273                  if (!scmi_event_handler_enable_events(hndl)) {

I really don't like that half these functions follow normal kernel error
style and half return true/false on failure.  Normally we would want
boolean functions to be clear from the name like access_ok() which
clearly returns true/false. But I didn't see that it causes any bugs
yet.

One thing I did notice is that scmi_sensors_init() return non-zero
positive values on success because it's returning the result from
idr_alloc().  This should trigger a warning message, I believe.

  1274                          scmi_put_handler(ni, hndl);
  1275                          ret = -EINVAL;
  1276                  }
  1277          }
  1278  
  1279          return ret;
  1280  }

regards,
dan carpenter



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