There was a report of NULL pointer dereference in ETF enable path for perf CS mode with PID. It is almost 100% reproducible when the process to monitor is something very active such as chrome and only with ETF as the sink. Currently in a bid to find the pid, the owner is dereferenced via task_pid_nr() call in tmc_enable_etf_sink_perf(). With owner being NULL, we get a NULL pointer dereference, so check the owner before dereferencing it to prevent the system crash.
perf record -e cs_etm/@tmc_etf0/ -N -p <pid>
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 0000000000000548 Mem abort info: ESR = 0x96000006 EC = 0x25: DABT (current EL), IL = 32 bits SET = 0, FnV = 0 EA = 0, S1PTW = 0 Data abort info: ISV = 0, ISS = 0x00000006 CM = 0, WnR = 0
Call trace: tmc_enable_etf_sink+0xe4/0x280 coresight_enable_path+0x168/0x1fc etm_event_start+0x8c/0xf8 etm_event_add+0x38/0x54 event_sched_in+0x194/0x2ac group_sched_in+0x54/0x12c flexible_sched_in+0xd8/0x120 visit_groups_merge+0x100/0x16c ctx_flexible_sched_in+0x50/0x74 ctx_sched_in+0xa4/0xa8 perf_event_sched_in+0x60/0x6c perf_event_context_sched_in+0x98/0xe0 __perf_event_task_sched_in+0x5c/0xd8 finish_task_switch+0x184/0x1cc schedule_tail+0x20/0xec ret_from_fork+0x4/0x18
Signed-off-by: Sai Prakash Ranjan saiprakash.ranjan@codeaurora.org ---
I am not sure of this incomplete solution hence the RFC. This issue was also reported when this code was first added [1] but somehow it didn't get much notice at the time. So the NULL pointer is propagated from as far as flexible_sched_in() (might even be earlier than this) in events core and deferenced in ETF code where it crashes. So I am not sure if its a problem with the core code or the etf driver. Plus it is not reproducible with all the processes, just something which is quite active ones such as chrome. This is with 5.4 kernel with all the coresight patches backported, I did go through events/core code from latest kernel to see if we are missing any fixes related to this but I couldn't find any so I believe this problem should also exist on latest kernel as well.
[1] https://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/coresight/2019-March/002278.html --- drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-tmc-etf.c | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
diff --git a/drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-tmc-etf.c b/drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-tmc-etf.c index 44402d413ebb..32f141d943ca 100644 --- a/drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-tmc-etf.c +++ b/drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-tmc-etf.c @@ -242,6 +242,9 @@ static int tmc_enable_etf_sink_perf(struct coresight_device *csdev, void *data) break; }
+ if (!handle->event->owner) + break; + /* Get a handle on the pid of the process to monitor */ pid = task_pid_nr(handle->event->owner);