[RFC PATCH 0/3] debugfs: make __debugfs_remove wait for dentry release

Roman Pen
2015-12-10T12:47:25Z

Hello.

Recently I observed that all over the sources people expect that debugfs_remove()
should behave as a barrier, hence file operations won't be invoked after it is
called and it is safe to free remain memory.

But by default debugfs_remove() does not guarantee that dentry will be released,
and after this call fops->open/read/write can still be invoked if someone holds
the reference on dentry because of successfull lookup.

For example here is the grep output:

*** drivers/block/pktcdvd.c:
pkt_debugfs_dev_remove[489] debugfs_remove(pd->dfs_f_info);
pkt_debugfs_dev_remove[490] debugfs_remove(pd->dfs_d_root);

*** drivers/char/virtio_console.c:
unplug_port[1595] debugfs_remove(port->debugfs_file);

*** drivers/crypto/qat/qat_common/adf_cfg.c:
adf_cfg_dev_remove[187] debugfs_remove(dev_cfg_data->debug);

*** drivers/gpu/drm/drm_debugfs.c:
drm_debugfs_remove_files[203] debugfs_remove(tmp->dent);

.... and more and more and more ...

where people do the following sequence:

debugfs_remove(dev->debugfs_dentry);
kfree(dev);

and 'dev' pointer was passed to 'debugfs_create_file("my_dev", , dev, dev_fops)',
so any access to 'dev' in file operations can lead to usage-after-free.

In this patch __debugfs_remove() waits for last dentry release callback.

BUT! I am not sure that nobody tries to remove the dentry from it's own file
operation (dentry suicide). And if so - deadlock will happen.

Probably, dentry_remove_self() should be implemented for such cases, which is
similar to sysfs_remove_file_self(). But for now I do not want to add new
function which can be useless in the nearest future.

Also I did a fix for automount inodes and increased i_nlink references because
of WARNING at fs/inode.c:273 drop_nlink.

Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org

Roman Pen (3):
debugfs: fix automount inode i_nlink references
debugfs: put private data to i_private for automount inode
debugfs: make __debugfs_remove wait for dentry release

fs/debugfs/inode.c | 58 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
1 file changed, 51 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

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2.6.2