An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes [LWN.net]

An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes

Posted Jul 6, 2022 7:41 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes by derobert
Parent article: An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes

Well, there's some call flow analysis tools out there that tries to discover ownership issues like the one that caused this problem.

However, C isn't a particularly nice language to do that with, particularly when you start using these tools after the fact you get a heap of false positives.

The real solution is to switch to a language with built-in object lifecycle guarantees. In this case, Rust.

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An Ubuntu kernel bug causes container crashes

Posted Jul 6, 2022 22:05 UTC (Wed) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

well, there are cocci checks for a ton of ownership issues in the kernel, if the internal change had come with such a cocci check and the ubuntu folks had run it then maybe this could have been caught, but why should it have been? It was an internal refactoring after all.

I have my doubts about rust’s ability to prevent this kind of thing, but stuff like that does help (thats why the kernel has lifetime related cocci checks)