Re: ext4: Funny characters appended to file names

[Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox@ubuntu.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 6 Dec 2020, 18:28 Colin Watson, <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 06, 2020 at 02:44:16PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > So, in the RESTORE_BACKUP case, shouldn't that be:
> >
> >   char *dstf = grub_util_path_concat (2, di, de->d_name);
> >
> > ... rather than grub_util_path_concat_ext?  Otherwise it seems to me
> > that it's going to try to append an additional argument which doesn't
> > exist, and may well add random uninitialised stuff from memory.  Running
> > grub-install under valgrind would probably show this up (I can't get it
> > to do it for me so far, but most likely I just haven't set up quite the
> > right initial conditions).
>
> While I couldn't reproduce this on amd64 (and valgrind didn't show any
> errors), I can reproduce it just fine on i386, which is what Paul is
> using.  I guess the va_list layout in memory is different enough between
> the two ABIs to tickle this.
>

Indeed, my patch was not tested on i386 and has had limited reviews
before landing in Ubuntu. Still not reviewed on the upstream mailing
list.

I am sorry for causing this issue.

> I'll apply this patch for Debian grub2 2.04-11, which I've confirmed
> fixes it for me:
>
> diff --git a/util/grub-install-common.c b/util/grub-install-common.c
> index a883b6dae..61f9075bc 100644
> --- a/util/grub-install-common.c
> +++ b/util/grub-install-common.c
> @@ -247,7 +247,7 @@ clean_grub_dir_real (const char *di, enum clean_grub_dir_mode mode)
>             }
>           else if (mode == RESTORE_BACKUP)
>             {
> -             char *dstf = grub_util_path_concat_ext (2, di, de->d_name);
> +             char *dstf = grub_util_path_concat (2, di, de->d_name);
>               dstf[strlen (dstf) - 1] = 0;
>               if (grub_util_rename (srcf, dstf) < 0)
>                 grub_util_error (_("cannot restore `%s': %s"), dstf,
>
> Dimitri, I know Ubuntu isn't very interested in supporting i386, but IMO
> you should apply this patch to Ubuntu in any case; it might affect other
> architectures, and anyway leaving known undefined behaviour around isn't
> a good idea.
>

Will do. And will resend it to the grub mailing list.

> Paul, note that you'll also need to run "sudo rm -f
> /boot/grub/i386-pc/*.{img,lst,mo,mod,o,sh}-*" to clean up the stray
> files created by this bug.

Thank you everyone for the code review.