Re: [GIT PULL] Please pull proc and exec work for 5.7-rc1

Bernd Edlinger
2020-04-08T15:21:11Z

On 4/8/20 5:14 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 3:20 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> But fundamentally the only reason we need this information stable
>>> before the point of no return is so that we can return a nice error
>>> code to the process calling exec. Instead of terminating the
>>> process with SIGSEGV.
>>
>> I'd suggest doing it the other way around instead: let the thread that
>> does the security_setprocattr() die, since execve() is terminating
>> other threads anyway.
>>
>> And the easy way to do that is to just make the rule be that anybody
>> who waits for this thing for write needs to use a killable wait.
>>
>> So if the execve() got started earlier, and already took the cred lock
>> (whatever we'll call it) for reading, then zap_other_threads() will
>> take care of another thread doing setprocattr().
>>
>> That sounds like a really simple model, no?
>
> Yes. I missed the fact that we could take the lock killable.
> We still unfortunately have the deadlock with ptrace.
>
> It might be simpler to make whichever lock we are dealing with per
> task_struct instead of per signal_struct. Then we don't even have to
> think about what de_thread does or if the lock is taken killable.
>

I think you said that already, but I did not understand the difference,
could you please give some more details about your idea?

Thanks
Bernd.

>
> Looking at the code in binfmt_elf.c there are about 11 other places
> after install_exec_creds where we can fail and would be forced to
> terminate the application with SIGSEGV instead of causing fork to fail.
>
>
>
>
> I keep wondering if we could do something similar to vfork. That is
> allocate an new task_struct and fully set it up for the post exec
> process, and then make it visible under tasklist_lock. Finally we could
> free the old process.
>
> That would appear as if everything happened atomically from
> the point of view of the rest of the kernel.
>
> As well as fixing all of the deadlocks and making it easy
> to ensure we don't have any more weird failures in the future.
>
> Eric
>
> p.s. For tasklist_lock I suspect we can put a lock in struct pid
> and use that to guard the task lists in struct pid. Which would
> allow for tasklist_lock to be take much less. Then we would
> just need a solution for task->parent and task->real_parent and
> I think all of the major users of tasklist_lock would be gone.
>
>