Re: [PATCH] xen-netfront: avoid crashing on resume after a failure in talk_to_netback()

David Miller [off-list ref] writes:

From: Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>
Date: Thu,  4 May 2017 14:23:04 +0200

quoted

Unavoidable crashes in netfront_resume() and netback_changed() after a
previous fail in talk_to_netback() (e.g. when we fail to read MAC from
xenstore) were discovered. The failure path in talk_to_netback() does
unregister/free for netdev but we don't reset drvdata and we try accessing
it again after resume.

Reset drvdata in netback_changed() the same way we reset it in
netfront_probe() and check for NULL in both netfront_resume() and
netback_changed() to properly handle the situation.

Signed-off-by: Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@redhat.com>

The circumstances under which netfront_probe() NULLs out the device
private is different than what you propose here, which is to do it
on a live device in netback_changed() whilst mutliple susbsytems
have a reference to this device and can call into the driver still.

It is only legal to do this in the probe function because such
references and execution possibilities do not exist at that point.

What really needs to happen is that the xenbus_driver must be told to
unregister this xen device and stop making calls into the driver for
it before you release the netdev state.

That is the only reasonable way to fix this bug.

True,

after looking at the issue again I realized that removing half of the
device in talk_to_netback() is a mistake - we should either treat errors
as fatal and remove the device completely or leave netdev in place
hoping that it'll magically got fixed later. I'm leaning towards the
former, I tried and the following simple patch does the job:

diff --git a/drivers/net/xen-netfront.c b/drivers/net/xen-netfront.c
index 6ffc482..7b61adb 100644
--- a/drivers/net/xen-netfront.c
+++ b/drivers/net/xen-netfront.c

@@ -1934,8 +1934,7 @@ static int talk_to_netback(struct xenbus_device *dev,
        xennet_disconnect_backend(info);
        xennet_destroy_queues(info);
  out:
-       unregister_netdev(info->netdev);
-       xennet_free_netdev(info->netdev);
+       device_unregister(&dev->dev);
        return err;
 }

In case noone is against this big hammer I can send this as v2.

Thank you for your feedback, David!

-- 
  Vitaly