Re: 3.6rc6 slab corruption.

[Raghavendra K T <raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On 09/20/2012 03:19 AM, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2012, David Rientjes wrote:
>
>>>  From 0806b133b5b28081adf23d0d04a99636ed3b861b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>>> From: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk<konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
>>> Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:23:01 -0400
>>> Subject: [PATCH 1/2] debugfs: Add lock for u32_array_read
>>>
>>> Dave Jones spotted that the u32_array_read was doing something funny:
>>>
>>> =============================================================================
>>> BUG kmalloc-64 (Not tainted): Redzone overwritten
>>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> INFO: 0xffff88001f4b4970-0xffff88001f4b4977. First byte 0xbb instead of 0xcc
>>> INFO: Allocated in u32_array_read+0xd1/0x110 age=0 cpu=6 pid=32767
>>>          __slab_alloc+0x516/0x5a5
>>>          __kmalloc+0x213/0x2c0
>>>          u32_array_read+0xd1/0x110
>>> .. snip..
>>> INFO: Freed in u32_array_read+0x99/0x110 age=0 cpu=0 pid=32749
>>>          __slab_free+0x3f/0x3bf
>>>          kfree+0x2d5/0x310
>>>          u32_array_read+0x99/0x110
>>>
>>> Linus tracked it down and found out that "debugfs is racy for that case
>>> [read calls in parallel on the debugfs]. At least the file->private_data
>>> accesses are, for the case of that "u32_array" case.
>>>
>>> In fact it is racy in ...  the whole "file->private_data" access ..
>>> If you have multiple readers on the same file, the whole
>>>
>>> 	if (file->private_data) {
>>> 		kfree(file->private_data);
>>> 		file->private_data = NULL;
>>> 	}
>>>
>>> 	file->private_data = format_array_alloc("%u", data->array,
>>>                                                                data->elements);
>>>
>>> thing is just a disaster waiting to happen." He suggested
>>> putting a lock which this patch does.
>>>
>>
>> Since these are non-seekable files, it must also race to find *ppos == 0.
>>
>>> The consequence of this is that it will trigger more spinlock usage,
>>> as this particular debugfs is used to provide a histogram of spinlock
>>> contention. But memory corruption is a worst offender then that.
>>>
>>> Reported-by: Dave Jones<davej@redhat.com>
>>> Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds<torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
>>
>> Tested-by: David Rientjes<rientjes@google.com>
>>
>
> An alternative to this, though, might be to never test for *ppos == 0 in
> u32_array_read() and do the format_array_alloc() in u32_array_open() to
> initialize file->private_data.  If that allocation fails, just return
> -ENOMEM.  Then you never need to add a mutex in the read path.
>

Tested-by: Raghavendra <raghavendra.kt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>