linux-kernel - Re: Resend: Another 4.4 to 4.5 floppy issue

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Date:	Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:54:44 +0200 (CEST)
From:	Jiri Kosina <jikos@...nel.org>
To:	Mark Hounschell <markh@...pro.net>
cc:	Linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Resend: Another 4.4 to 4.5 floppy issue

On Mon, 11 Jul 2016, Mark Hounschell wrote:

> Well, all that was specified in my original post. I can no longer open the
> floppy drive with no floppy media inserted. Worse, I can also no longer open a
> floppy with media inserted that is not a "linux" recognized format. A floppy
> drive is a removable media device and should be treated as such. The original
> implementation of the O_NDELAY flag allowed it to be.
> 
> Any removable media device should be capable of being opened with no, or even
> unrecognizable media installed. The kernel and its utilities should not
> "assume" to much when it comes to removable media. Consider a SCSI tape drive
> or even a removable media SCSI disk drive. How would you explain an open
> failure to someone trying to open a SCSI tape drive that had no tape or even a
> "non-tar" formatted tape media in it???
> Or better yet, trying to open a removable media device the was write protected
> but didn't include O_RDONLY in the open?

Alright, so you are basically supplementing O_NDELAY flag in order to 
avoid check_disk_change() being called. It's rather a coincidence that it 
has worked this way, but I agree with you that we can't ignore the fact 
that there is userspace relying on this behavior.

> The original behavior of the floppy driver was correct. I have no idea 
> what BUG these changes were supposed to fix but the "fix" obviously 
> broke user land. Was this bug reported by some new ROBOT test or 
> something? The kernel floppy driver has been stable for years now 

That's not really true; the code is a racy mess, and this is being 
uncovered only when virtualized floppy devices started to exist (because 
they are much faster than a real hardware, and the different timing 
reveals bugs that were not visible before).

This particular fix was because syzkaller found a way how easily corrupt 
kernel memory using O_NDELAY to floppy driver; see

	https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/2/2/848

> so I am really confused as to why these changes were induced.

The floppy driver is in an orphan mode; no new "features" are added "just 
because". Everything that's happening there is to fix real bugs in the 
kernel.

I'll look into ways how to fix this, but I am afraid this is going to be 
really tricky. Therefore we'd have to very likely proceed asap with revert 
of 09954bad448 and coming up with a workaround that'd still avoid the bug 
reported by syzkaller.

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs