Re: [syzbot] [kernfs?] possible deadlock in kernfs_fop_llseek

Christian Brauner
2024-04-05T13:48:27Z

On Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 01:19:35PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 08:51:35AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 12:33:40PM +0300, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> > > I don't follow what you are saying.
> > > Which code is in non-starter violation?
> > > kernfs for calling lookup_bdev() with internal of->mutex held?
> >
> > That is a huge problem, and has been causing endless annoying lockdep
> > chains in the block layer for us. If we have some way to kill this
> > the whole block layer would benefit.
>
> Why not just try and add a better resume api that forces resume to not
> use a path argument neither for resume_file nor for writes to
> /sys/power/resume. IOW, extend the protocol what can get written to
> /sys/power/resume and then phase out the path argument. It'll take a
> while but it's a possibly clean solution.

In fact, just looking at this code with a naive set of eyes for a second:

* There's early_lookup_bdev() which deals with PARTUUID,
PARTLABEL, raw device number, and lookup based on /dev. No actual path
lookup involved in that.

* So the only interesting case is lookup_bdev() for /sys/power/suspend.
That one takes arbitrary paths. But being realistic for a moment...
How many people will specify a device path that's _not_ some variant
of /dev/...? IOW, how many people will specify a device path that's
not on devtmpfs or a symlink on devtmpfs? Probably almost no one.

Containers come to mind ofc. But they can't mount devtmpfs so usually
what they do is that they create a tmpfs mount at /dev and then
bind-mount device nodes they need into there. But unprivileged
containers cannot use suspend because that requires init_user_ns
capabilities. And privileged containers that are allowed to hibernate
and use custom paths seem extremly unlikely as well.

So really, _naively_ it seems to me that one could factor out the /dev/*
part of the device number parsing logic in early_lookup_bdev() and port
resume_store() to use that first and only if that fails fall back to
full lookup_bdev(). (Possibly combined with some sort of logging that the
user should use /dev/... paths or at least a way to recognize that this
arbitrary path stuff is actually used.)

And citing from a chat with the hibernation maintainer in systemd:

<brauner> So /sys/power/resume does systemd ever write anything other than a /dev/* path in to there?
<maintainer> Hmm? You never do that? It only accepts devno.

So that takes away one of the main users of this api. So I really
suspect that arbitrary device path is unused in practice. Maybe I'm all
wrong though.