Re: debugfs vs. device removal

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 09:33:50AM -0800, Omar Sandoval wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 05:03:48PM +0100, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > 
> > > > In the block layer, we abuse sysfs to export some per-device debugging
> > > > information. I was looking into moving this to debugfs, but I realized
> > > > that debugfs doesn't have a mechanism to ensure that a file associated
> > > > with a device is safe to use when the device is removed. 
> > > 
> > > What do you mean by "safe"?  The race conditions where you remove a file
> > > and still have it open should all now be resolved in 4.8 and 4.9, di dwe
> > > miss something?
> > 
> > This is something else -- Omar is right, hid-debugfs interface is buggy. 
> > It basically doesn't synchronize the data dumping with device removal, so 
> > if device is removed and deallocated and the race is hit, it tries to 
> > dereference struct hid_device which has already been freed.
> 
> Yup, I'm talking about the case where I create a debugfs file and the
> data pointer is, say, a struct request_queue. If userspace calls open()
> on a debugfs file, then the device goes away, the struct request_queue
> is going to get freed and read() will blow up.
> 
> If we're talking about objects with a struct kobject (like struct
> request_queue), can we just grab an extra reference in open() and drop
> it in release()? This allows userspace to keep stuff pinned
> indefinitely, but debugfs is root-only and the use-case is usually just
> `cat`.

Again, debugfs got a bunch of changes in the 4.8 and 4.9 timeframe to
resolve this issue.  Try it and see with just a "normal" debugfs file
and see how it works.

thanks,

greg k-h