Re: Potentially unbounded allocations in seq_read?

Al Viro
2013-12-11T18:07:09Z

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 05:59:57PM +0000, Tvrtko Ursulin wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-12-11 at 17:49 +0000, Al Viro wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 05:04:41PM +0000, Tvrtko Ursulin wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > It seems that the buffer allocation in seq_read can double in size
> > > indefinitely, at least I've seen that in practice with /proc/<pid>/smaps
> > > (attempting to double m->size to 4M on a read of 1000 bytes). This
> > > produces an ugly WARN_ON_ONCE, which should perhaps be avoided? (given
> > > that it can be triggered by userspace at will)
> >
> > An entry in /proc/<pid>/smaps that did not fit into 2Mb? Seriously?
> > How in hell has that happened? If you can trigger that at will, please
> > post the reproducer.
>
> Yeah, no, wrong assumption. It was not about the size but the number of
> reads. For example:
>
> open("/proc/3131/smaps", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
> fstat64(1, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666, st_rdev=makedev(1, 3), ...}) = 0
> brk(0xf9019000) = 0xf9019000
> read(3, "be483000-be4ab000 rw-s 00000000 "..., 4096) = 4054
> write(1, "be483000-be4ab000 rw-s 00000000 "..., 4054) = 4054
> read(3, "be5c3000-be5c5000 rw-s 10da3f000"..., 4096) = 3656
> write(1, "be5c3000-be5c5000 rw-s 10da3f000"..., 3656) = 3656
> read(3, "be6b1000-be6b2000 rw-s 10da48000"..., 4096) = 3661
> write(1, "be6b1000-be6b2000 rw-s 10da48000"..., 3661) = 3661
> read(3, "be6b9000-be6ba000 rw-s 10da38000"..., 4096) = 3599
> write(1, "be6b9000-be6ba000 rw-s 10da38000"..., 3599) = 3599
> read(3, "be6d6000-be7b6000 rw-s 10d889000"..., 4096) = 3599
> write(1, "be6d6000-be7b6000 rw-s 10d889000"..., 3599) = 3599
> read(3, "be884000-be885000 rw-s 10d85c000"..., 4096) = 3661
> write(1, "be884000-be885000 rw-s 10d85c000"..., 3661) = 3661
> read(3, "be88d000-be8de000 rw-p 00000000 "..., 4096) = 4007
> write(1, "be88d000-be8de000 rw-p 00000000 "..., 4007) = 4007
> read(3, "bea29000-bea4d000 r-xp 00000000 "..., 4096) = 4057
> write(1, "bea29000-bea4d000 r-xp 00000000 "..., 4057) = 4057
> read(3, "beab3000-bead0000 r--p 00000000 "..., 4096) = 2092
> write(1, "beab3000-bead0000 r--p 00000000 "..., 2092) = 2092
> read(3, 0xf9017030, 4096) = -1 ENOMEM (Out of memory)

OK, so you've got ENOMEM somewhere, but where had it come from?
The buffer from previous read() ought to have sufficed for this one,
unless the next entry had been much longer than usual...