Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Fix warning at fs/dcache.c:430 dentry_free

[Helge Deller]

Hi Al,

On 4/6/26 22:28, Al Viro wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2026 at 09:07:33PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 06, 2026 at 09:52:16PM +0200, Helge Deller wrote:
> > > The debian buildd servers for the parisc architecture crash reproduceably when
> > > building the webkit2gtk debian package, shortly after having shown the warning
> > > below.
> > >
> > > This patch keeps the lock of the dentry up until when the dentry is given back
> > > to the cache and after having freed the "external dentry name".
> > >
> > > I'm not sure if this patch is really correct, but it seems to have fixed the
> > > problem, although more testing is needed.
> >
> > Hard NAK.  You are turning every place that grabs ->d_lock on a dentry scheduled
> > for freeing (like, say it, any RCU pathwalk trying to check if the end result can
> > be grabbed) into a UAF.
> >
> > Do you have a better localized reproducer?
>
> BTW, could you reproduce it on viro/vfs.git #work.dcache-busy-wait?  It's possible
> that changes in there might accidentally fix that, and if they did it would narrow
> the things down a lot.

Ok, will try.
Please note that building kernel/ installing / running dpkg build takes hours & days,
so it may take quite some time until I come back here....
 
> Some invariants that ought to hold:
> 	1) dentry_free() should never be called without DCACHE_DENTRY_KILLED
> 	2) DCACHE_DENTRY_KILLED should never be set on positive dentries
> 	3) DCACHE_DENTRY_KILLED | DCACHE_PAR_LOOKUP is only possible for
> dentries that had never been inserted into ->d_in_lookup_hash
> 	4) dentry with DCACHE_DENTRY_KILLED should never become positive
>
> Could you turn that
> 	WARN_ON(!hlist_unhashed(&dentry->d_alias));
> in whatever you'd been testing into
> 	if (WARN_ON(!hlist_unhashed(&dentry->d_alias)))
> 		printk(KERN_ERR "->d_inode = %p, ->d_flags = %x",
> 			dentry->d_inode, dentry->d_flags);
> and see what it shows?  That's a separate from #work.dcache-busy-wait test -
> please, do that one on the tree where you'd seen the original bug.

Ok.

Thanks!
Helge