Re: [Bluez-devel] Oops involving RFCOMM and sysfs

Tejun Heo
2008-01-07T02:38:05Z

Hello,

Tejun Heo wrote:
> Al Viro wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 11:30:25PM +0900, Tejun Heo wrote:
>>>> Assuming that this is what we get, everything looks explainable - we
>>>> have sysfs_rename_dir() calling sysfs_get_dentry() while the parent
>>>> gets evicted. We don't have any exclusion, so while we are playing
>>>> silly buggers with lookups in sysfs_get_dentry() we have parent become
>>>> negative; the rest is obvious...
>>> That part of code is walking down the sysfs tree from the s_root of
>>> sysfs hierarchy and on each step parent is held using dget() while being
>>> referenced, so I don't think they can turn negative there.
>> Turn? Just what stops you from getting a negative (and unhashed) from
>> lookup_one_noperm() and on the next iteration being buggered on mutex_lock()?
>
> Right, I haven't thought about that. When sysfs_get_dentry() is called,
> @sd is always valid so unless there was existing negative dentry, lookup
> is guaranteed to return positive dentry, but by populating dcache with
> negative dentry before a node is created, things can go wrong. I don't
> think that's what's going on here tho. If that was the case, the
> while() loop looking up the next sd to lookup (@cur) should have blown
> up as negative dentry will have NULL d_fsdata which doesn't match any sd.
>
> I guess what's needed here is d_revalidate() as other distributed
> filesystems do. I'll test whether this can be actually triggered and
> prepare a fix. Thanks a lot for pointing out the problem.

This can't happen because lookup of non-existent entry doesn't create a
negative dentry. The new dentry is never hashed and killed after lookup
failure, the above scenario can't happen.

That said, the mechanism is a bit too fragile. sysfs currently ensures
that dentry/inode point to the associated sysfs_dirent. This is mainly
remanent of conversion from previous VFS based implementation. I think
the right thing to do here is to make sysfs behave like other proper
distributed filesystems using d_revalidate.

Thanks.

--
tejun