Re: [PATCH 0/3] Avoid live-lock in fault-in+uaccess loops with sub-page faults

Andrew Morton
2021-11-24T21:36:04Z

On Wed, 24 Nov 2021 19:20:21 +0000 Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There are a few places in the filesystem layer where a uaccess is
> performed in a loop with page faults disabled, together with a
> fault_in_*() call to pre-fault the pages. On architectures like arm64
> with MTE (memory tagging extensions) or SPARC ADI, even if the
> fault_in_*() succeeded, the uaccess can still fault indefinitely.
>
> In general this is not an issue since such code restarts the
> fault_in_*() from where the uaccess failed, therefore guaranteeing
> forward progress. The btrfs search_ioctl(), however, rewinds the
> fault_in_*() position and it can live-lock. This was reported by Al
> here:

Btrfs livelock on some-of-arm sounds fairly serious. Should we
backport this? If so, a48b73eca4ce ("btrfs: fix potential deadlock in
the search ioctl") appears to be a suitable Fixes: target?