Re: [PATCH 5/5] fs: Convert struct file::f_count to refcount_long_t

Peter Zijlstra
2024-05-03T10:36:36Z

On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 11:37:25AM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 05:41:23PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 01:14:45AM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 05:10:18PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > >
> > > > But anyway, there needs to be a general "oops I hit 0"-aware form of
> > > > get_file(), and it seems like it should just be get_file() itself...
> > >
> > > ... which brings back the question of what's the sane damage mitigation
> > > for that. Adding arseloads of never-exercised failure exits is generally
> > > a bad idea - it's asking for bitrot and making the thing harder to review
> > > in future.
> >
> > Linus seems to prefer best-effort error recovery to sprinkling BUG()s
> > around. But if that's really the solution, then how about get_file()
> > switching to to use inc_not_zero and BUG on 0?
>
> Making get_file() return an error is not an option. For all current
> callers that's pointless churn for a condition that's not supposed to
> happen at all.
>
> Additionally, iirc *_inc_not_zero() variants are implemented with
> try_cmpxchg() which scales poorly under contention for a condition
> that's not supposed to happen.

unsigned long old = atomic_long_fetch_inc_relaxed(&f->f_count);
WARN_ON(!old);

Or somesuch might be an option?