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tty: make sure to flush any pending work when halting the ldisc
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When I rewrote tty ldisc code to use proper reference counts (commits
65b7704 and cbe9352) in order to avoid a race with hangup, the
test-program that Eric Biederman used to trigger the original problem
seems to have exposed another long-standing bug: the hangup code did the
'tty_ldisc_halt()' to stop any buffer flushing activity, but unlike the
other call sites it never actually flushed any pending work.

As a result, if you get just the right timing, the pending work may be
just about to execute (ie the timer has already triggered and thus
cancel_delayed_work() was a no-op), when we then re-initialize the ldisc
from under it.

That, in turn, results in various random problems, usually seen as a
NULL pointer dereference in run_timer_softirq() or a BUG() in
worker_thread (but it can be almost anything).

Fix it by adding the required 'flush_scheduled_work()' after doing the
tty_ldisc_halt() (this also requires us to move the ldisc halt to before
taking the ldisc mutex in order to avoid a deadlock with the workqueue
executing do_tty_hangup, which requires the mutex).

The locking should be cleaned up one day (the requirement to do this
outside the ldisc_mutex is very annoying, and weakens the lock), but
that's a larger and separate undertaking.

Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Tested-by: Xiaotian Feng <xtfeng@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Yanmin Zhang <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>
Tested-by: Dave Young <hidave.darkstar@gmail.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Linus Torvalds committed Aug 25, 2009
1 parent 7111dc7 commit 5c58cef
Showing 1 changed file with 7 additions and 3 deletions.
10 changes: 7 additions & 3 deletions drivers/char/tty_ldisc.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -508,8 +508,9 @@ static void tty_ldisc_restore(struct tty_struct *tty, struct tty_ldisc *old)
* be obtained while the delayed work queue halt ensures that no more
* data is fed to the ldisc.
*
* In order to wait for any existing references to complete see
* tty_ldisc_wait_idle.
* You need to do a 'flush_scheduled_work()' (outside the ldisc_mutex)
* in order to make sure any currently executing ldisc work is also
* flushed.
*/

static int tty_ldisc_halt(struct tty_struct *tty)
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -753,11 +754,14 @@ void tty_ldisc_hangup(struct tty_struct *tty)
* N_TTY.
*/
if (tty->driver->flags & TTY_DRIVER_RESET_TERMIOS) {
/* Make sure the old ldisc is quiescent */
tty_ldisc_halt(tty);
flush_scheduled_work();

/* Avoid racing set_ldisc or tty_ldisc_release */
mutex_lock(&tty->ldisc_mutex);
if (tty->ldisc) { /* Not yet closed */
/* Switch back to N_TTY */
tty_ldisc_halt(tty);
tty_ldisc_reinit(tty);
/* At this point we have a closed ldisc and we want to
reopen it. We could defer this to the next open but
Expand Down

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