Re: dcache shrink list corruption?

From: Al Viro
Date: Wed Apr 30 2014 - 15:59:26 EST


On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 08:02:27PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 08:42:01PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
>
> > Message-ID: <20140430154958.GC3113@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> I see... Several points:
> * I still think that it's better to do handling of "we see
> DCACHE_DENTRY_KILLED already set" in dentry_kill() itself.
> * in dentry_kill(dentry, 0) we *know* that it's not on a shrink
> list - the caller has just removed it from there and we'd kept ->d_lock
> since that point. What's more, with that scheme we don't need to bother
> with can_free at all - just grab ->d_lock after ->d_release() call and check
> DCACHE_SHRINK_LIST. No sense trying to avoid that - in case where we
> could just go ahead and free the sucker, there's neither contention nor
> anybody else interested in that cacheline, so spin_lock(&dentry->d_lock)
> is pretty much free.
>
> IOW, I'd prefer to do the following (completely untested) on top of 1/6--4/6:

Sigh... One more problem:
/*
* We found an inuse dentry which was not removed from
* the LRU because of laziness during lookup. Do not free it.
*/
if (dentry->d_lockref.count) {
spin_unlock(&dentry->d_lock);
continue;
}
should become
if (dentry->d_lockref.count > 0) {
....
instead - lockref_mark_dead() slaps -128 into it, so we'll just leak all
dentries where dput() has come first and decided to leave the suckers
for us.

Another thing: I don't like what's going on with freeing vs. ->d_lock there.
Had that been a mutex, we'd definitely get a repeat of "vfs: fix subtle
use-after-free of pipe_inode_info". The question is, can spin_unlock(p)
dereference p after another CPU gets through spin_lock(p)? Linus?

It can be dealt with by setting DCACHE_RCUACCESS in "let another guy free
it" cases and playing with rcu_read_lock a bit, but I wonder whether we
need to bother - quick look through alpha/sparc/ppc shows that on those
we do not and the same is true for non-paravirt case on x86. I hadn't
checked what paravirt one does, though, and I certainly hadn't done
exhaustive search for architectures doing something weird...
--
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/