Re: mac80211: When adding a new station, notify driver before adding to hash

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Fri, 2015-08-21 at 09:57 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-08-20 at 17:39 -0400, Marty Faltesek wrote:
> > 
> > I believe the following race occurs:
> > 
> > 1. mac80211 is processing a new station that just joined.
> > 2. Before it's completed initializing the station, we take an 
> > interrupt,
> >    with a packet from the STA.
> > 3. That interrupt is a management frame from the station which 
> > causes
> >    rate_control_rate_update to be called, which calls back into the 
> > 
> > ath10k
> >    with the not-fully initialized station.
> 
> I'm a bit confused by the stack trace - is this IBSS and the stack
> trace is just bad? I don't really see how we get from 
> sta_ps_transition
> to sta_rc_update?
> 
> > 4. It reaches ath10k_sta_rc_update before the interrupted thread 
> > had
> > reached ath10k_sta_state()
> >    Therefore it has not yet initialized its workqueue. Still NULL.
> > 5. When this NULL workqueue gets passed to queue_work, it passes
> >    the first check that its not in use because of the NULL struct, 
> > but fails the
> >    next check in __queue_work because a NULL structure makes the 
> > test
> >    for an empty list fail.
> > 
> > 
> > Proposed patch is to not add the new station in the hash until 
> > after 
> > the
> > driver initializes it. But I'm not clear what implications this 
> > has. 
> > Could this
> > cause other problems?
> > 
> 
> I think the issue Michał pointed out is valid - but we can probably
> check sta->uploaded in the relevant places?
> 

Come to think of it though - we might cache & delay the call so drivers
actually get the updated values.

johannes