[RFC] freeing unliked file indefinitely delayed

[Al Viro]

	Normally opening a file, unlinking it and then closing will have
the inode freed upon close() (provided that it's not otherwise busy and
has no remaining links, of course).  However, there's one case where that
does *not* happen.  Namely, if you open it by fhandle with cold dcache,
then unlink() and close().

	In normal case you get d_delete() in unlink(2) notice that dentry
is busy and unhash it; on the final dput() it will be forcibly evicted from
dcache, triggering iput() and inode removal.  In this case, though, we end
up with *two* dentries - disconnected (created by open-by-fhandle) and
regular one (used by unlink()).  The latter will have its reference to inode
dropped just fine, but the former will not - it's considered hashed (it
is on the ->s_anon list), so it will stay around until the memory pressure
will finally do it in.  As the result, we have the final iput() delayed
indefinitely.  It's trivial to reproduce -

#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

void flush_dcache(void)
{
        system("mount -o remount,rw /");
}

static char buf[20 * 1024 * 1024];

main()
{
        int fd;
        union { 
                struct file_handle f;
                char buf[MAX_HANDLE_SZ];
        } x;
        int m;

        x.f.handle_bytes = sizeof(x);
        chdir("/root");
        mkdir("foo", 0700);
        fd = open("foo/bar", O_CREAT | O_RDWR, 0600);
        close(fd);
        name_to_handle_at(AT_FDCWD, "foo/bar", &x.f, &m, 0);
        flush_dcache();
        fd = open_by_handle_at(AT_FDCWD, &x.f, O_RDWR);
        unlink("foo/bar");
        write(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
        system("df .");			/* 20Mb eaten */
        close(fd);
        system("df .");			/* should've freed those 20Mb */
        flush_dcache();
        system("df .");			/* should be the same as #2 */
}

will spit out something like
Filesystem     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         322023 303843      1131 100% /
Filesystem     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         322023 303843      1131 100% /
Filesystem     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         322023 283282     21692  93% /
- inode gets freed only when dentry is finally evicted (here we trigger
than by remount; normally it would've happened in response to memory
pressure hell knows when).

IMO it's a bug.  Between the close() and final flush_dcache() the file has
no surviving links, is *not* busy, won't show up in fuser/lsof/whatnot
output, and yet it's still not freed.  I'm not saying that it's realistically
exploitable (albeit with nfsd it might be), but it's a very unpleasant
self-LART.

FWIW, my prefered fix would be simply to have the final dput() treat
disconnected dentries as "kill on sight"; checking for i_nlink of the
inode, as Bruce suggested several years ago, will *not* work, simply
because having another link to that file and unlinking it after close
will reproduce the situation - disconnected dentry sticks around in
dcache past its final dput() and past the last unlink() of our file.
Theoretically it might cause an overhead for nfsd (no_subtree_check v3
export might see more d_alloc()/d_free(); icache retention will still
prevent constant rereading the inode from disk).  _IF_ that proves to
be noticable, we might need to come up with something more elaborate
(e.g. have unlink() and rename() kick disconnected aliases out if the link
count has reached 0), but it's more complex and needs careful ananlysis
of correctness - we need to prove that there's no way to miss the link
count reaching 0.  I would prefer to treat all disconnected as unhashed
for dcache retention purposes - it's simpler and less brittle.  Comments?
I mean something like this:

diff --git a/fs/dcache.c b/fs/dcache.c
index 7a3f3e5..5c8ea15 100644
--- a/fs/dcache.c
+++ b/fs/dcache.c
@@ -642,7 +642,7 @@ static inline bool fast_dput(struct dentry *dentry)
 
 	/*
 	 * If we have a d_op->d_delete() operation, we sould not
-	 * let the dentry count go to zero, so use "put__or_lock".
+	 * let the dentry count go to zero, so use "put_or_lock".
 	 */
 	if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_OP_DELETE))
 		return lockref_put_or_lock(&dentry->d_lockref);
@@ -697,7 +697,7 @@ static inline bool fast_dput(struct dentry *dentry)
 	 */
 	smp_rmb();
 	d_flags = ACCESS_ONCE(dentry->d_flags);
-	d_flags &= DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST;
+	d_flags &= DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST | DCACHE_DISCONNECTED;
 
 	/* Nothing to do? Dropping the reference was all we needed? */
 	if (d_flags == (DCACHE_REFERENCED | DCACHE_LRU_LIST) && !d_unhashed(dentry))
@@ -776,6 +776,9 @@ repeat:
 	if (unlikely(d_unhashed(dentry)))
 		goto kill_it;
 
+	if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_DISCONNECTED))
+		goto kill_it;
+
 	if (unlikely(dentry->d_flags & DCACHE_OP_DELETE)) {
 		if (dentry->d_op->d_delete(dentry))
 			goto kill_it;
--
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/