[RFC]: Possible race condition on an SMP between proc_lookupfd andtasks on other cpus

From: Chandru
Date: Wed Oct 11 2006 - 05:16:13 EST


Hi All,
I am running a RHEL5 distro kernel ( which seems to be quite close to Vannilla kernel ) and am having a problem on one of my system (PPC64). The system crashes ( goes in to xmon ) every now and then while running TCP stress tests on the system. The following is the backtrace and exception information ( from distro kernel, which might be of very little help).

f:mon> e
cpu 0xf: Vector: 300 (Data Access) at [c0000000eaa1b490]
pc: c0000000001351e0: .tid_fd_revalidate+0x64/0x220
lr: c0000000001351cc: .tid_fd_revalidate+0x50/0x220
sp: c0000000eaa1b710
msr: 8000000000009032
dar: 6b6b6b6b6b6b6b6b
dsisr: 40000000
current = 0xc0000001182864f0
paca = 0xc000000000456300
pid = 24558, comm = netstat
f:mon> t
[c0000000eaa1b7b0] c000000000138118 .proc_lookupfd+0x17c/0x21c
[c0000000eaa1b860] c0000000000f359c .do_lookup+0x108/0x268
[c0000000eaa1b920] c0000000000f65f8 .__link_path_walk+0xc58/0x1364
[c0000000eaa1ba00] c0000000000f6da0 .link_path_walk+0x9c/0x184
[c0000000eaa1bb40] c0000000000f7364 .do_path_lookup+0x304/0x398
[c0000000eaa1bbf0] c0000000000f7db8 .__user_walk_fd+0x58/0x88
[c0000000eaa1bc90] c0000000000edcdc .sys_readlinkat+0x44/0x130
[c0000000eaa1bdc0] c000000000016784 .compat_sys_readlink+0x14/0x28
[c0000000eaa1be30] c00000000000871c syscall_exit+0x0/0x40


From code analysis ( vannilla and distro kernel), it looks like there can exist a small time window between

spin_unlock(&files->file_lock) in proc_fd_instantiate()

and fcheck_files() in tid_fd_revalidate() during which the contents of 'struct files_struct files' of a task could be released/cleared by that task ( during an exec probably ).

i.e between....
static struct dentry *proc_fd_instantiate(struct inode *dir,....)
{
...
...
if (file->f_mode & 2)
inode->i_mode |= S_IWUSR | S_IXUSR;
spin_unlock(&files->file_lock); <------- 1.
put_files_struct(files);

inode->i_op = &proc_pid_link_inode_operations;
inode->i_size = 64;
ei->op.proc_get_link = proc_fd_link;
dentry->d_op = &tid_fd_dentry_operations;
d_add(dentry, inode);
/* Close the race of the process dying before we return the dentry */
if (tid_fd_revalidate(dentry, NULL)) <-------- 2.
...
...
}


static int tid_fd_revalidate(struct dentry *dentry, struct nameidata *nd)
{
...
...
if (task) {
files = get_files_struct(task);
if (files) {
rcu_read_lock();
if (fcheck_files(files, fd)) { <---------- 2
...
...
}

Could this code analysis be right? and can this race condition be fixed?.

Thanks,
Chandru
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/