From: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>

In preparation for converting the kmalloc family of allocators to the
type-aware kmalloc_obj family, we need to make sure that the returned
type from the allocation matches the type of the variable being
assigned. (The kmalloc family returns "void *", which can be implicitly
cast to any pointer type.)

argv holds 5 pointers, but the size was taken from the array type
"char *[5]", which would make the allocation type a pointer to that
array rather than the "char **" being assigned. Allocate 5 entries of
the target's type instead. The resulting allocation size is the same.

Build tested ARCH=x86_64 allmodconfig with GCC 16.2.0:
kernel/module/kmod.o

Assisted-by: LLM coccinelle
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>
---
Cc: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Cc: Petr Pavlu <petr.pavlu@suse.com>
Cc: Daniel Gomez <da.gomez@kernel.org>
Cc: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Cc: Aaron Tomlin <atomlin@atomlin.com>
Cc: <linux-modules@vger.kernel.org>
---
 kernel/module/kmod.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/kernel/module/kmod.c b/kernel/module/kmod.c
index a25dccdf7aa7..c19b14c68de5 100644
--- a/kernel/module/kmod.c
+++ b/kernel/module/kmod.c
@@ -81,7 +81,7 @@ static int call_modprobe(char *orig_module_name, int wait)
 	char *module_name;
 	int ret;
 
-	char **argv = kmalloc(sizeof(char *[5]), GFP_KERNEL);
+	char **argv = kmalloc_array(5, sizeof(*argv), GFP_KERNEL);
 	if (!argv)
 		goto out;
 
-- 
2.34.1

On 9/17/26 11:12 PM, Kees Cook wrote:
> From: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>
> 
> In preparation for converting the kmalloc family of allocators to the
> type-aware kmalloc_obj family, we need to make sure that the returned
> type from the allocation matches the type of the variable being
> assigned. (The kmalloc family returns "void *", which can be implicitly
> cast to any pointer type.)
> 
> argv holds 5 pointers, but the size was taken from the array type
> "char *[5]", which would make the allocation type a pointer to that
> array rather than the "char **" being assigned. Allocate 5 entries of
> the target's type instead. The resulting allocation size is the same.
> 
> Build tested ARCH=x86_64 allmodconfig with GCC 16.2.0:
> kernel/module/kmod.o
> 
> Assisted-by: LLM coccinelle
> Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees+treewide@kernel.org>

Looks ok to me. I've queued the patch on modules-next for 7.4-rc1.

-- 
Thanks,
Petr