On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 02:22:39PM +0000, Will Deacon wrote:
Instead, we've come up with a more plausible sequence that can in theory
happen on a single CPU:
<task foo calls exit()>
do_exit
exit_mm
mmgrab(mm); // foo's mm has count +1
BUG_ON(mm != current->active_mm);
task_lock(current);
current->mm = NULL;
task_unlock(current);
<irq and ctxsw to kthread>
[...]
mmdrop(mm); // foo's mm has count -1
At this point, we've got an imbalanced count on the mm and could free it
prematurely as seen in the KASAN log. A subsequent context-switch away
from foo would therefore result in a use-after-free.
Peter already dismissed an algorithm issue here but I thought I'd give
model checking a go (it only deals with mm_users/mm_count; also added a
heavily simplified exec_mmap() in the loop):
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/cmarinas/kernel-tla.git/tree/ctxsw.tla
As expected, it didn't show any problems (though it does not take memory
ordering into account).
Now, there are lots of other mmget/mmput and mmgrab/mmdrop throughout
the kernel and finding an imbalanced call needs more work.
--
Catalin