Re: Memory leak in ath9k_hif_usb_dealloc_tx_urbs()

[Atul Gopinathan]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 08:28:15AM +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 10:36:52PM +0300, Pavel Skripkin wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > I did some debugging on this
> > https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=3ea507fb3c47426497b52bd82b8ef0dd5b6cc7ee
> > and, I believe, I recognized the problem. The problem appears in case of
> > ath9k_htc_hw_init() fail. In case of this fail all tx_buf->urb krefs will be
> > initialized to 1, but in free function:
> > 
> > static void ath9k_hif_usb_dealloc_tx_urbs(struct hif_device_usb *hif_dev)
> > 
> > ....
> > 
> > static void ath9k_hif_usb_dealloc_tx_urbs(struct hif_device_usb *hif_dev)
> > {
> >     ...
> > 	list_for_each_entry_safe(tx_buf, tx_buf_tmp,
> > 				 &hif_dev->tx.tx_buf, list) {
> > 		usb_get_urb(tx_buf->urb);
> > 		...
> > 		usb_free_urb(tx_buf->urb);
> > 		...
> > 		}
> > 
> > Krefs are incremented and then decremented, that means urbs won't be freed.
> > I found your patch and I can't properly understand why You added usb_get_urb(tx_buf->urb).
> > Can You explain please, I believe this will help me or somebody to fix this ussue :)
> 
> I think almost everyone who has looked into this has given up due to the
> mess of twisty-passages here with almost no real-world benefits for
> unwinding them :)

Just wanted to confirm, what is the status of this bug then, as in is it
invalid (not sure if that's the correct word)? I happened to stumble
across the same syzkaller bug report Pavel posted above, in the morning.
Saw that there has been no patch tests/fixes on this yet according to
syzkaller. Spent a couple of hours going through it before sending a
test patch to syzbot which returned an "OK" (and the patch is exactly
what Pavel pointed out, I simply removed the `usb_get_urb()`). Before
sending anything to the mailing list, I made sure to search all the
relavant networking lists to see if this topic had been brought up (learnt
to do this from my preious mistakes of sending already accepted patches) and
luckily I found this.

Syzbot has had 380 crashes caused by this bug, with the latest being
today. So I wanted to confirm what should be done be about this bug. 

Thank you!
Atul