this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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For this Channel File, yes. I don't know what the failure rate is - this article mentions 40-70%, but there could well be a lot of variance between different companies' machines.
The driver has presumably had this bug for some time, but they've never had a channel file trigger it before. I can't find any good information on how they deploy these channel files other than that they push several changes per day. One would hope these are always run by a diverse set of test machines to validate there's no impact to functionality but only they know the procedure there. It might vary based on how urgent a mitigation is or how invasive it'll be - though they could just be winging it. It'd be interesting to find out exactly how this all went down.
I'm a bit OOTL on what exactly a channel file is, being a Linux person, or how it relates to a driver. Are they in userspace, then? That would make it slightly less insane they didn't check it thoroughly before their Friday update.
It's a proprietary config file. I think it's a list of rules to forbid certain behaviours on the system. Presumably it's downloaded by some userland service, but it has to be parsed by the kernel driver. I think the files get loaded ok but the driver crashes when iterating over an array of pointers. Possibly these are the rules and some have uninitialised pointers but this is speculation based on some kernel dumps on twitter. So the bug probably existed in the kernel driver for quite a while, but they pushed a (somehow) malformed config file that triggered the crash.