It is possible to leak pointers via %ps without KALLSYMS enabled.
With KALLSYMS pointers can be leaked if they can not be resolved.

The tiny series has two patches, one for each issue.
I do follow the %p format instead of printing "(unknown)" since I care
more about getting it out of the way than the actual content (as long as
it is not the leaked pointer). Last time the discussion added the h:
prefix to a hashed pointer to identify it as such. I would like to keep
this part out of the series since there are few users that expect a
certain pointer width and adding two extra characters would break that
(we could strip the two 0 on 64bit but again, not related to this
problem here).

v2…v3: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260821152614.2202196-1-bigeasy@linutronix.de/
 - Instead of "(unknown)" the hashed pointer is printed. This follows
   the generic %p flow.
 - In v2 I argued that it is better so print the actual pointer instead
   hiding it for post-mortem analysis. After looking at some backtraces
   with invalid pointers (not part of the kernel image) I realised the
   the PC is already part of the register dump. There I changed it back
   to what %p would do if it can't resolve a pointer. Again, following
   %p flow so it can be overridden at boot.

v1…v2: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260814144854.746840-1-bigeasy@linutronix.de/
 - For %ps and !KALLSYMS no_hash_pointers is used to decide if the
   pointer should be written or not. This aligns with the %p policy.
 - For %ps and KALLSYMS, unresolved pointer continue to be leaked. It
   has been pointed out it might be useful to see them in backtraces/
   crashes if the return address became invalid.

Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>
Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Cc: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@chromium.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.pizza>
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

Sebastian

---
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior (2):
      vsprintf: Don't leak pointers for %ps without KALLSYMS enabled
      kallsyms: Don't leak pointers for unresolved symbols

 include/linux/sprintf.h |  1 +
 kernel/kallsyms.c       |  3 ++-
 lib/vsprintf.c          | 27 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 3 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
---
base-commit: ec8bf8280261294a9b9b4520414b42704c7f9f6b
change-id: 20261015-vsprintf_kallsym-73d5ed6f800e

Best regards,
--  
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>