Re: [PATCH] staging: pi433: fix race condition in pi433_open

[Hugo Lefeuvre]

Hi Dan,

> We need to decrement device->users-- on the error paths as well.
> This function was already slightly broken with respect to counting the
> users, but let's not make it worse.
> 
> I think it's still a tiny bit racy because it's not an atomic type.

Oh right, I missed that. I'll fix it in the v2. :)

> I'm not sure the error handling in open() works either.  It's releasing
> device->rx_buffer but there could be another user.

Agree.

> The ->rx_buffer
> should be allocated in probe() instead of open() probably, no?  And then
> freed in pi433_remove().  Then once we put that in the right layer
> it means we can just get rid of ->users...

It would be great to get rid of this counter, indeed. But how to do it
properly without breaking things ? It seems to be useful to me...

For example, how do you handle the case where remove() is called but
some operations are still running on existing fds ?

What if remove frees the rx_buffer while a read() call executes this ?

copy_to_user(buf, device->rx_buffer, bytes_received)

rx_buffer is freed by release() because it's the only buffer from the
device structure used in read/write/ioctl, meaning that we can only
free it when we are sure that it isn't used anywhere anymore.

So, we can't do it in remove() unless remove() is delayed until the
last release() has returned.

> The lines:
>
>   1008                  if (!device->spi)
>   1009                          kfree(device);
>
> make no sort of sense at all...  Fortunately it's not posssible for
> device->spi to be NULL so it's dead code.

Really ? device->spi is NULL-ed in remove() so that operations on
remaining fds can detect remove() was already called and free remaining
resources:
 
1296         /* make sure ops on existing fds can abort cleanly */
1297         device->spi = NULL;

Thanks for your time !

Regards,
 Hugo

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             Hugo Lefeuvre (hle)    |    www.owl.eu.com
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