Subject: Re: [PATCH net 2/3] net: sctp: fix panic on duplicate ASCONF chunks

From: Daniel Borkmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 01:25:11 +0200

On 10/12/2014 03:42 AM, Neil Horman wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 12:02:31AM +0200, Daniel Borkmann wrote:
>> On 10/10/2014 05:39 PM, Neil Horman wrote:
>> ...
>>> Is it worth adding a WARN_ON, to indicate that two ASCONF chunks have been
>>> received with duplicate serials?
>>
>> Don't think so, as this would be triggerable from outside.
>>
> WARN_ON_ONCE then, per serial number?

Sorry, but no. If someone seriously runs that in production and it
triggers a WARN() from outside, admins will start sending us bug
reports that apparently something with the kernel code is wrong.

WARN() should only be used if we have some *internal* unexpected bug,
but can still fail gracefully. This would neither be an actual code bug
nor would it be an internally triggered one, plus we add unnecessary
complexity to the code. Similarly, for those reasons we don't WARN()
and throw a stack trace when we receive, say, an skb of invalid length
elsewhere.

I'd also like to avoid any additional pr_debug().

I don't think people enable them in production, and if they really do,
it's too late anyway as we already have received this chunk. If anything,
I'd rather like to see debugging code further removed as we have already
different facilities in the kernel for runtime debugging that are much
more powerful.