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

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Date:   Tue, 23 Aug 2016 13:01:10 -0400
From:   Mark Hounschell <markh@...pro.net>
To:     Jiri Kosina <jikos@...nel.org>
Cc:     Linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Resend: Another 4.4 to 4.5 floppy issue

On 07/12/2016 04:54 AM, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> 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.
>

Are we making any progress on fixing this regression? Anything I can do?

Regards
Mark