Re: [RFD] readonly/read-write semantics

[Jean-Marc Saffroy]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Alexander Viro wrote:

> > In 2.4.9, I have encountered a strange condition while playing with file
> > structs chained on a superblock list (sb->s_files) : some of them can have
> > a NULL f_dentry pointer. The only case I found which can cause this is
> > when fput is called and f_count drops to zero. Is that the only case ?
>
> Yes, it is, and yes, it's legitimate - code that scans that list should
> (and in-tree one does) deal with such case.

AFAICT fput (and also dentry_open, BTW) nullifies f_dentry without any
lock held, so code that scans the list (such as fs_may_remount_ro, I
haven't looked for other instances) can never assume that a file struct
found in the list has or even will keep what looks like a valid f_dentry.

> fs_may_remount_ro() is, indeed, racy and had been since very long.

Sure, let's consider code in fs_may_remount_ro :

	file_list_lock();
	/* loop over files in sb->s_files */
		if (!file->f_dentry)
			continue;
		/* now a concurrent fput may set f_dentry to NULL */
		inode = file->f_dentry->d_inode; /* oops */

Maybe the file struct should be removed from the list /before/ f_dentry is
assigned NULL ?

> However, the main problem is not in opening something after the
> check - the check itself is not exact enough.

I agree fs_may_remount_ro can report wrong results (ie. "you may remount
ro" while you really can't) because of how it is used, but as stated
above, I think it also has a small but real potential for directly
crashing the system, and should be fixed.

-- 
Jean-Marc Saffroy - Research Engineer - Silicomp Research Institute
mailto:[e-mail]