linux-kernel - Re: bio linked list corruption.

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Date:   Tue, 6 Dec 2016 08:33:41 -0800
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@...il.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Dave Jones <davej@...emonkey.org.uk>, Chris Mason <clm@...com>,
        Jens Axboe <axboe@...com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>, Josef Bacik <jbacik@...com>,
        David Sterba <dsterba@...e.com>,
        linux-btrfs <linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>
Subject: Re: bio linked list corruption.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 12:16 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org> wrote:
>>
>> Of course, I'm really hoping that this shmem.c use is the _only_ such
>> case.  But I doubt it.
>
> $ git grep DECLARE_WAIT_QUEUE_HEAD_ONSTACK | wc -l
> 28

Hmm. Most of them seem to be ok, because they use "wait_event()",
which will always remove itself from the wait-queue. And they do it
from the place that allocates the wait-queue.

IOW, the mm/shmem.c case really was fairly special, because it just
did "prepare_to_wait()", and then did a finish_wait() - and not in the
thread that allocated it on the stack.

So it's really that "some _other_ thread allocated the waitqueue on
the stack, and now we're doing a wait on it" that is bad.

So the normal pattern seems to be:

 - allocate wq on the stack
 - pass it on to a waker
 - wait for it

and that's ok, because as part of "wait for it" we will also be
cleaning things up.

The reason mm/shmem.c was buggy was that it did

 - allocate wq on the stack
 - pass it on to somebody else to wait for
 - wake it up

and *that* is buggy, because it's the waiter, not the waker, that
normally cleans things up.

Is there some good way to find this kind of pattern automatically, I wonder....

                     Linus