aranym bug, manifests as "ida_remove called for id=13" on recent kernels

Al Viro
2010-10-07T17:49:49Z

I've spent quite a while hunting that crap down; reverting VFS fix
mentioned in original thread *does* get rid of the symptoms, but so does the
patch below.

What happens is this: if ->follow_link() (usually something like
stat("/proc/2/fd", ...) done by pidof(8)) return ERR_PTR(-....), we return
to __do_follow_link() and do the following:
*p = dentry->d_inode->i_op->follow_link(dentry, nd);
error = PTR_ERR(*p);
if (!IS_ERR(*p)) {
char *s = nd_get_link(nd);
error = 0;
if (s)
error = __vfs_follow_link(nd, s);
else if (nd->last_type == LAST_BIND) {
error = force_reval_path(&nd->path, nd);
if (error)
path_put(&nd->path);
}
}
return error;

We _should_ return non-zero value; IS_ERR(ERR_PTR(-n)) is 1 and
PTR_ERR(ERR_PTR(n)) is -n. What happens instead is that this thing
actually returns 0. And no, it's not a miscompile. Patch below
removes the symptoms of the bug, but only if both parts are present.
I.e. *not* doing "report = 1" in proc_pid_follow_link() gives us
visible breakage, despite the fact that report is initialized as
1 and nothing except proc_pid_follow_link() ever tries to assign
anything to it. Seeing that fs/namei.c and fs/proc/base.c are
compiled separately, we can exclude gcc problems.

The cheapest way to reproduce is to boot with init=/bin/sh, then
mount /proc and have stat("/proc/2/exe", &st) called; if stat()
returns 0, we are fscked. The critical part is between return
from proc_exe_link() (we'll leave it via if (!mm) return -ENOENT;)
to return from __do_follow_link() -> do_follow_link() -> link_path_walk().

If somebody familiar with aranym guts are up to debugging that, more
power to them. If I would've seen it on real hardware, I'd suspect
something weird going on with caches, but...

FWIW, it's observable on amd64 host; I haven't tried it on x86. Version
of aranym is 0.9.6beta2-1 (one in lenny). Have fun...

Patch [*NOT* for inclusion into mainline, obviously] follows:

diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c
index 24896e8..da5bb7f 100644
--- a/fs/namei.c
+++ b/fs/namei.c
@@ -524,6 +524,8 @@ static inline void path_to_nameidata(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd)
nd->path.dentry = path->dentry;
}

+int report = 1;
+
static __always_inline int
__do_follow_link(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd, void **p)
{
@@ -552,6 +554,8 @@ __do_follow_link(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd, void **p)
path_put(&nd->path);
}
}
+ if (report && !error && IS_ERR(*p))
+ printk("fucked: %d %p\n", error, *p);
return error;
}

diff --git a/fs/proc/base.c b/fs/proc/base.c
index a1c43e7..24579de 100644
--- a/fs/proc/base.c
+++ b/fs/proc/base.c
@@ -1513,6 +1513,7 @@ static void *proc_pid_follow_link(struct dentry *dentry, struct nameidata *nd)
goto out;

error = PROC_I(inode)->op.proc_get_link(inode, &nd->path);
+ {extern int report; report = 1;}
out:
return ERR_PTR(error);
}