Re: Q: perf_event && task->ptrace_bps[]

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 09:34:59PM +0100, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> On 11/08, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> >
> > I am trying to understand the usage of hw-breakpoints in arch_ptrace().
> > ptrace_set_debugreg() and related code looks obviously racy. Nothing
> > protects us against flush_ptrace_hw_breakpoint() called by the dying
> > tracee. Afaics we can leak perf_event or use the already freed memory
> > or both.
> >
> > Am I missed something?
> >
> > Looking into the git history, I don't even know which patch should be
> > blamed (if I am right), there were too many changes. I noticed that
> > 2ebd4ffb6d0cb877787b1e42be8485820158857e "perf events: Split out task
> > search into helper" moved the PF_EXITING check from find_get_context().
> > This check coould help if sys_ptrace() races with SIGKILL, but it was
> > racy anyway.
> 
> Ping.
> 
> Any idea how to fix this cleanly? May be we can reuse perf_event_mutex,
> but this looks soooo ugly. And do_exit()->flush_ptrace_hw_breakpoint()
> has the strange "FIXME:" comment which doesn't help me to understand
> what can we do.

Yeah forget about the FIXME, it's a stale thing I need to remove.

> 
> Probably the best fix is to change this code so that the tracer owns
> ->ptrace_bps[], not the tracee. But this is not trivial, and needs a
> lot of changes in ptrace code.


How much complicated would it be?

Because I see three solutions to solve this:

- Have a mutex inside thread->ptrace_bps. The contention must be
rare and only concern ptrace and tracee exit. That's the simplest.

- Have an atomic refcount inside thread->ptrace_bps so that the actual
flush can be delayed until necessary. Same as above, but exit and ptrace
can execute concurrently, code must be a bit more complicated though.

- Your solution. I'm just not sure how much change it involves. Seems
like we need to notify the parent for it to flush the breakpoints
when a task exits. Same when ptrace detaches we need to flush.

What do you guys think? At a glance it seems a mutex or a refcount
would take more memory for each thread, but I can manage to have
->ptrace_bps a block only allocated if necessary. It would be only
a pointer if no breakpoint is queued.