Subject: Re: [PATCH] fix use after free in netlink_kernel_create()

From: Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:49:06 +0200

Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 13:52:58 +0200
> Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>>Quite a few users of netlink_kernel_create will panic when creating
>>the socket fails (rtnetlink for example, which is always present),
>>so you might as well call panic here directly.
> 
> 
> That's a bit lame.  Panicing at do_initcalls() time is OK (something is
> seriously screwed anyway) but we usually try to handle the ENOMEM nicely if
> it happens at modprobe-time.

The users I looked at can't be built as modules (rtnetlink, genetlink,
audit subsystem), I'm not aware of any modules panicing on
netlink_kernel_create failure. But all of netlink, genetlink and
rtnetlink are always built-in when CONFIG_NET=y, so we might as well
panic here.