aarch64 core: use of uninitialised value
Project / Subsystem
binutils / binutils
Date
2026-05-26
Proposer
Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>
Source type
public_inbox
Consensus
Proposed
Sentiment
—/10
Technical tradeoffs
- • By ignoring rawsize in bfd_core, the tool relies solely on the 'size' field, which might be insufficient in some edge cases (though none are mentioned).
- • The fix avoids excessive memory allocation, improving performance and stability when dealing with core files.
All attributes
- project
- binutils
- subsystem
- binutils
- patch_id
- —
- discussion_id
- ahVq6shyddPt4gaM@squeak.grove.modra.org
- source_type
- public_inbox
- title
- aarch64 core: use of uninitialised value
- headline
- BFD: Fixes potential uninitialized value use in aarch64 core dumps
- tldr
- Avoids allocating excessive memory for aarch64 core sections by ignoring `rawsize` in bfd_core, preventing potential uninitialized value usage and OOM errors.
- proposer
- Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>
- consensus
- Proposed
- outcome
- proposed
- sentiment_score
- —
- technical_tradeoffs
-
- • By ignoring rawsize in bfd_core, the tool relies solely on the 'size' field, which might be insufficient in some edge cases (though none are mentioned).
- • The fix avoids excessive memory allocation, improving performance and stability when dealing with core files.
- series_id
- —
- series_role
- standalone
- series_parts
- []
- tags
-
- • bfd
- • aarch64
- • core dump
- • memory allocation
- • bugfix
- bugzilla_url
- —
- date
- 2026-05-26T00:00:00.000Z
aarch64 core: use of uninitialised value
A recent commit added support for PT_AARCH64_MEMTAG_MTE, which stores p_memsz (memory range) in rawsize and p_filesz in size within a section. When reading core files, bfd allocates memory based on the larger of rawsize and size. Since p_memsz can be much larger than p_filesz, this leads to excessive memory allocation, potentially using uninitialized values or causing OOM errors with fuzzed inputs. This patch avoids these issues by ignoring rawsize in bfd_core to calculate memory allocation.