Re: Broken pci_block_user_cfg_access interface

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

On 2011-08-24 17:02, Brian King wrote:
> On 08/24/2011 05:43 AM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> trying to port the generic device interrupt masking pattern of
>> uio_pci_generic to KVM's device assignment code, I stumbled over some
>> fundamental problem with the current pci_block/unblock_user_cfg_access
>> interface: it does not provide any synchronization between blocking
>> sides. This allows user space to trigger a kernel BUG, just run two
>>
>> while true; do echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/<some-device>/reset; done
>>
>> loops in parallel and watch the kernel oops.
>>
>> Instead of some funky open-coded locking mechanism, we would rather need
>> a plain mutex across both the user space access (via sysfs) and the
>> sections guarded by pci_block/unblock_user_cfg_access so far. But I'm
>> not sure which of them already allow sleeping, specifically if the IPR
>> driver would be fine with such a change. Can someone in the CC list
>> comment on this?
> 
> The ipr driver calls pci_block/unblock_user_cfg_access from interrupt
> context, so a mutex won't work.

Ugh. What precisely does it have to do with the config space while
running inside an IRQ handler (or holding a lock that synchronizes it
with such a handler)?

> When the pci_block/unblock API was
> originally added, it did not have the checking it has today to detect
> if it is being called nested. This was added some time later. The

For a reason...

> API that works best for the ipr driver is to allow for many block calls,
> but a single unblock call unblocks access. It seems like what might
> work well in the case above is a block count. Each call to pci_block
> increments a count. Each pci_unblock decrements the count and only
> actually do the unblock if the count drops to zero. It should be reasonably
> simple for ipr to use that sort of an API as well.

That will just paper over the underlying bug: multiple kernel users (!=
sysfs access) fiddle with the config space in an unsynchronized fashion.
Think of sysfs-triggered pci_reset_function while your ipr driver does
its accesses.

So it's pointless to tweak the current pci_block semantics, we rather
need to establish a new mechanism that synchronizes *all* users of the
config space.

Jan

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