Re: [PATCH v3] mwifiex: fix sleep in atomic context bugs caused by dev_coredumpv

["Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>]

Duoming Zhou <duoming@zju.edu.cn> writes:

> There are sleep in atomic context bugs when uploading device dump
> data in mwifiex. The root cause is that dev_coredumpv could not
> be used in atomic contexts, because it calls dev_set_name which
> include operations that may sleep. The call tree shows execution
> paths that could lead to bugs:
>
>    (Interrupt context)
> fw_dump_timer_fn
>   mwifiex_upload_device_dump
>     dev_coredumpv(..., GFP_KERNEL)
>       dev_coredumpm()
>         kzalloc(sizeof(*devcd), gfp); //may sleep
>         dev_set_name
>           kobject_set_name_vargs
>             kvasprintf_const(GFP_KERNEL, ...); //may sleep
>             kstrdup(s, GFP_KERNEL); //may sleep
>
> In order to let dev_coredumpv support atomic contexts, this patch
> changes the gfp_t parameter of kvasprintf_const and kstrdup in
> kobject_set_name_vargs from GFP_KERNEL to GFP_ATOMIC. What's more,
> In order to mitigate bug, this patch changes the gfp_t parameter
> of dev_coredumpv from GFP_KERNEL to GFP_ATOMIC.

vmalloc in atomic context?

Not only does dev_coredumpm set a device name dev_coredumpm creates an
entire device to hold the device dump.

My sense is that either dev_coredumpm needs to be rebuilt on a
completely different principle that does not need a device to hold the
coredump (so that it can be called from interrupt context) or that
dev_coredumpm should never be called in an context that can not sleep.


Looking at fw_dump_timer_fn the only purpose of the timer is to trigger
a device dump after a certain amount of time.  So I suspect all that is
needed to fix this issue is to change the type of devdump_timer to
struct delayed_work and use scheduled_delayed_work instead of mod_timer.


Eric

p.s.  I looked at this because there was coredump in the infrastructure
name, and I do some of the work to keep coredumps working.  Device dump
seems like a much better term, and I wished the designer of the api had
used that instead.