Re: [PATCH] padata: avoid race in reordering

Jason A. Donenfeld [off-list ref] wrote:

Under extremely heavy uses of padata, crashes occur, and with list
debugging turned on, this happens instead:

[87487.298728] WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 882 at lib/list_debug.c:33
__list_add+0xae/0x130
[87487.301868] list_add corruption. prev->next should be next
(ffffb17abfc043d0), but was ffff8dba70872c80. (prev=ffff8dba70872b00).
[87487.339011]  [<ffffffff9a53d075>] dump_stack+0x68/0xa3
[87487.342198]  [<ffffffff99e119a1>] ? console_unlock+0x281/0x6d0
[87487.345364]  [<ffffffff99d6b91f>] __warn+0xff/0x140
[87487.348513]  [<ffffffff99d6b9aa>] warn_slowpath_fmt+0x4a/0x50
[87487.351659]  [<ffffffff9a58b5de>] __list_add+0xae/0x130
[87487.354772]  [<ffffffff9add5094>] ? _raw_spin_lock+0x64/0x70
[87487.357915]  [<ffffffff99eefd66>] padata_reorder+0x1e6/0x420
[87487.361084]  [<ffffffff99ef0055>] padata_do_serial+0xa5/0x120

padata_reorder calls list_add_tail with the list to which its adding
locked, which seems correct:

spin_lock(&squeue->serial.lock);
list_add_tail(&padata->list, &squeue->serial.list);
spin_unlock(&squeue->serial.lock);

This therefore leaves only place where such inconsistency could occur:
if padata->list is added at the same time on two different threads.
This pdata pointer comes from the function call to
padata_get_next(pd), which has in it the following block:

next_queue = per_cpu_ptr(pd->pqueue, cpu);
padata = NULL;
reorder = &next_queue->reorder;
if (!list_empty(&reorder->list)) {
      padata = list_entry(reorder->list.next,
                          struct padata_priv, list);
      spin_lock(&reorder->lock);
      list_del_init(&padata->list);
      atomic_dec(&pd->reorder_objects);
      spin_unlock(&reorder->lock);

      pd->processed++;

      goto out;
}
out:
return padata;

I strongly suspect that the problem here is that two threads can race
on reorder list. Even though the deletion is locked, call to
list_entry is not locked, which means it's feasible that two threads
pick up the same padata object and subsequently call list_add_tail on
them at the same time. The fix is thus be hoist that lock outside of
that block.

Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>

Patch applied.  Thanks.
-- 
Email: Herbert Xu [off-list ref]
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
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