Richard reported sporadic (roughly one in 10 or so) null dereferences and
other strange behaviour for a set of automated LTP tests. Things like:
BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000008
#PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode
#PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page
PGD 0 P4D 0
Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP PTI
CPU: 0 PID: 1516 Comm: umount Not tainted 5.10.0-yocto-standard #1
Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009), BIOS rel-1.13.0-48-gd9c812dda519-prebuilt.qemu.org 04/01/2014
RIP: 0010:kernfs_sop_show_path+0x1b/0x60
...or these others:
RIP: 0010:do_mkdirat+0x6a/0xf0
RIP: 0010:d_alloc_parallel+0x98/0x510
RIP: 0010:do_readlinkat+0x86/0x120
There were other less common instances of some kind of a general scribble
but the common theme was mount and cgroup and a dubious dentry triggering
the NULL dereference. I was only able to reproduce it under qemu by
replicating Richard's setup as closely as possible - I never did get it
to happen on bare metal, even while keeping everything else the same.
In commit 71d883c37e ("cgroup_do_mount(): massage calling conventions")
we see this as a part of the overall change:
--------------
struct cgroup_subsys *ss;
- struct dentry *dentry;
[...]
- dentry = cgroup_do_mount(&cgroup_fs_type, fc->sb_flags, root,
- CGROUP_SUPER_MAGIC, ns);
[...]
- if (percpu_ref_is_dying(&root->cgrp.self.refcnt)) {
- struct super_block *sb = dentry->d_sb;
- dput(dentry);
+ ret = cgroup_do_mount(fc, CGROUP_SUPER_MAGIC, ns);
+ if (!ret && percpu_ref_is_dying(&root->cgrp.self.refcnt)) {
+ struct super_block *sb = fc->root->d_sb;
+ dput(fc->root);
deactivate_locked_super(sb);
msleep(10);
return restart_syscall();
}
--------------
In changing from the local "*dentry" variable to using fc->root, we now
export/leave that dentry pointer in the file context after doing the dput()
in the unlikely "is_dying" case. With LTP doing a crazy amount of back to
back mount/unmount [testcases/bin/cgroup_regression_5_1.sh] the unlikely
becomes slightly likely and then bad things happen.
A fix would be to not leave the stale reference in fc->root as follows:
--------------
dput(fc->root);
+ fc->root = NULL;
deactivate_locked_super(sb);
--------------
...but then we are just open-coding a duplicate of fc_drop_locked() so we
simply use that instead.
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Zefan Li <lizefan.x@bytedance.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v5.1+
Reported-by: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>
Fixes: 71d883c37e ("cgroup_do_mount(): massage calling conventions")
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
1e7107c5ef