Re: [BUG] net: 3com: 3c59x: Possible null-pointer dereferences caused by Compaq PCI BIOS32 problem
From: Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
Date: 2025-12-12 14:02:43
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On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 03:52:01PM +0800, Tuo Li wrote:
Hi, I found a few potential null-pointer dereferences in vortex_probe1() in Linux 6.18.
You might want to look at the history of this driver. The last time
anybody seemed to really care about this driver was:
commit a6522c08987daa6f9ac25a9c08870041a43db6b0
Author: Neil Horman [off-list ref]
Date: Thu Feb 25 13:02:50 2016 -0500
3c59x: mask LAST_FRAG bit from length field in ring
Recently, I fixed a bug in 3c59x:
commit 6e144419e4da11a9a4977c8d899d7247d94ca338
Author: Neil Horman [off-list ref]
Date: Wed Jan 13 12:43:54 2016 -0500
3c59x: fix another page map/single unmap imbalance
Which correctly rebalanced dma mapping and unmapping types. Unfortunately it
introduced a new bug which causes oopses on older systems.
Everything since then has been tree wide changes.
It looks like these issues stem from the call at line 987 used as a workaround for the Compaq PCI BIOS32 problem:
Also, maybe do some research into "Compaq PCI BIOS32". I _think_ that was from the time of the 80386? Maybe 80486? Support for those processors has been dropped, so i don't think it is even possible to boot such a machine to invoke this possible NULL pointer dereference. Please do some sanity checking before reporting potential issues. I _think_ you are wasting your own time, and valuable Maintainer time. Andrew