Re: [PATCH] netfilter: per netns nf_conntrack_cachep

[Jon Masters <jonathan@jonmasters.org>]

On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 23:36 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-02-01 at 15:52 +0100, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> 
> > [PATCH] netfilter: per netns nf_conntrack_cachep
> > 
> > nf_conntrack_cachep is currently shared by all netns instances, but
> > because of SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU special semantics, this is wrong.
> > 
> > If we use a shared slab cache, one object can instantly flight between
> > one hash table (netns ONE) to another one (netns TWO), and concurrent
> > reader (doing a lookup in netns ONE, 'finding' an object of netns TWO)
> > can be fooled without notice, because no RCU grace period has to be
> > observed between object freeing and its reuse.
> > 
> > We dont have this problem with UDP/TCP slab caches because TCP/UDP
> > hashtables are global to the machine (and each object has a pointer to
> > its netns).
> > 
> > If we use per netns conntrack hash tables, we also *must* use per netns
> > conntrack slab caches, to guarantee an object can not escape from one
> > namespace to another one.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
> 
> You're totally right, I'd missed this (RCU behavior wrt SLAB caches was
> one of these black magic voodoo things until Peter Z. set me straight
> with his explanation that it only applies to the freeing of the cache
> itself, not the objects - that makes sense in the grand scheme of what
> RCU is trying to achieve, and so in theory, yeah we could just verify
> the ct object we get back out of the cache is from the same ns, should
> work just as well as doing per-ns caches, but not as clean IMO). I'm
> still not sure it explains the specific corruption I'm seeing, but I
> just made some coffee and put on some T. Rex to help me think.

It happens in the kmem_cache_free in nf_conntrack_free (as I can
trivially confirm with printk), so you're almost certainly right, but I
am just shoving in a bunch of debug code equivalent to the logic in SLUB
kmem cache freeing to see precisely how that pointer corruption occurs,
mostly for curiosity, and to confirm for sure what happens.

Jon.