[BUG stable, 2.6.32.27] sched: delayed cleanup of user_struct

Oleg Nesterov
2011-01-10T12:44:00Z

On 01/10, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
>
> On 01/10, Stefan Priebe - Profihost AG wrote:
> >
> > i've seen your patch and i've seen that we've a lot of crashes in the
> > process cleanup since upgrading from 2.6.32.19 to 2.6.32.27 and i would
> > like to know if you can tell me if your patch will solve them.
> >
> > Log: (ATTENTION Log is in reverse order)
> > http://pastebin.com/WiyEKScs
>
> No, that patch has nothing to do with this crash.
>
> Looks like, this is CONFIG_USER_SCHED bug. Probably something like
> double-free but I know nothing about this code and USER_SCHED is
> deprecated anyway.
>
> I'd suggest you to disable this option.
>
>
> Perhaps it makes sense to report this bug to lkml, though.
> Probably 3959214f971417f4162926ac52ad4cd042958caa is the offending
> commit.

Yes, at first glance "sched: delayed cleanup of user_struct" looks buggy...

uid_hash_find:

hlist_for_each_entry(user, h, hashent, uidhash_node) {
if (user->uid == uid) {
/* possibly resurrect an "almost deleted" object */
if (atomic_inc_return(&user->__count) == 1)
cancel_delayed_work(&user->work);
return user;

cancel_delayed_work() can only cancel the timer. If the timer has
already expired, it can't cancel the pending work, and
cleanup_user_struct() can run after uid_hash_find() returns.

This _looks_ OK, cleanup_user_struct() should notice ->__count == 0
and do nothing. But it is not.

Suppose that the new "owner" of this user_struct (the caller of
uid_hash_find) in turn does free_uid() before up->work->func()
completes. In this case INIT_DELAYED_WORK() can corrupt the pending
work, or 2 instances of work->func() can race with each other on
different CPUs. In particular, this can lead to double free.

Kay?

Oleg.