Re: bio linked list corruption.

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Oct 24, 2016 5:00 PM, "Linus Torvalds" <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 3:42 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Now the fallocate thread catches up and *exits*.  Dave's test makes a
> > new thread that reuses the stack (the vmap area or the backing store).
> >
> > Now the shmem_fault thread continues on its merry way and takes
> > q->lock.  But oh crap, q->lock is pointing at some random spot on some
> > other thread's stack.  Kaboom!
>
> Note that q->lock should be entirely immaterial, since inode->i_lock
> nests outside of it in all uses.
>
> Now, if there is some code that runs *without* the inode->i_lock, then
> that would be a big bug.
>
> But I'm not seeing it.
>
> I do agree that some race on some stack data structure could easily be
> the cause of these issues. And yes, the vmap code obviously starts
> reusing the stack much earlier, and would trigger problems that would
> essentially be hidden by the fact that the kernel stack used to stay
> around not just until exit(), but until the process was reaped.
>
> I just think that in this case i_lock really looks like it should
> serialize things correctly.
>
> Or are you seeing something I'm not?

No, I missed that.

--Andy