Re: net/core: BUG in unregister_netdevice_many

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I'm assuming that the real cause is simply that "dev->reg_state" ends
> up being NETREG_UNREGISTERING or something. Maybe the BUG_ON() could
> be just removed, and replaced by the previous warning about
> NETREG_UNINITIALIZED.
>
> Something like the attached (TOTALLY UNTESTED) patch.

.. might as well test it.

That patch doesn't fix the problem, but it does show that yes, it was
NETREG_UNREGISTERING:

  unregister_netdevice: device pim6reg/ffff962dc4606000 was not registered (2)

but then immediately afterwards we get

  general protection fault: 0000 [#1] SMP
  Workqueue: netns cleanup_net
  RIP: 0010:dev_shutdown+0xe/0xc0
  Call Trace:
     rollback_registered_many+0x2a5/0x440
     unregister_netdevice_many+0x1e/0xb0
     default_device_exit_batch+0x145/0x170

which is due to a

        mov    0x388(%rdi),%eax

where %rdi is 0xdead000000000090. That is at the very beginning of
dev_shutdown, it's "dev" itself that has that value, so it comes from
(_another_) invocation of rollback_registered_many(), when it does
that

        list_for_each_entry(dev, head, unreg_list) {

so it seems to be a case of another "list_del() leaves list in bad
state", and it was the added test for "dev->reg_state !=
NETREG_REGISTERED" that did that

        list_del(&dev->unreg_list);

and left random contents in the unreg_list.

So that "handle error case" was almost certainly just buggy too.

And the bug seems to be that we're trying to unregister a netdevice
that has already been unregistered.

Over to Eric and networking people. This oops is user-triggerable, and
leaves the machine in a bad state (the original BUG_ON() and the new
GP fault both happen while holding the RTNL, so networking is not
healthy afterwards.

                      Linus