param: fix lots of bugs with writing charp params from sysfs, by leaking mem.
e180a6b7 "param: fix charp parameters set via sysfs" fixed the case where charp parameters written via sysfs were freed, leaving drivers accessing random memory. Unfortunately, storing a flag in the kparam struct was a bad idea: it's rodata so setting it causes an oops on some archs. But that's not all: 1) module_param_array() on charp doesn't work reliably, since we use an uninitialized temporary struct kernel_param. 2) there's a fundamental race if a module uses this parameter and then it's changed: they will still access the old, freed, memory. The simplest fix (ie. for 2.6.32) is to never free the memory. This prevents all these problems, at cost of a memory leak. In practice, there are only 18 places where a charp is writable via sysfs, and all are root-only writable. Reported-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> Cc: Sitsofe Wheeler <sitsofe@yahoo.com> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> Cc: Christof Schmitt <christof.schmitt@de.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> Cc: stable@kernel.org
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