Re: [PATCH] lib/ethdev: fix segfault in secondary process by validating dev_private pointer

[Khadem Ullah <14pwcse1224@uetpeshawar.edu.pk>]

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Agree, but I think it's also a good practice to guard against known cases
that are prone to crashes.

On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 9:14 PM Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 09:01:42PM +0500, Khadem Ullah wrote:
> >    Thanks for the follow up.
> >    Understood. That makes sense. However, I’d like to highlight that
> >    applications should ideally be robust and interactive enough to handle
> >    all edge cases where a segfault or unexpected error might occur. While
> >    clear documentation is certainly important, relying solely on it may
> >    not be sufficient. In my view, potential segfaults should be handled
> >    explicitly in code to ensure stability and to prevent silent failures,
> >    especially in production environments.
> >
> In fairness, where stability is the main concern, I'd generally recommend
> avoiding multi-process entirely. Or, if it has to be used, the primary
> process should be a minimal slim one, that sets up the ports and memory and
> thereafter sleeps so that it should never crash unexpectedly!
>
> Even with that, if any secondary process dies, you'll still have all the
> buffers in use by that secondary process leaked, so for any multiprocess
> system the only safe behaviour for the system is to restart all processes
> if any process unexpectedly terminate.
>
> /Bruce
>


-- 
Engr. Khadem Ullah,
Software Engineer,
Dreambig Semiconductor Inc
https://dreambigsemi.com/

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