* Rusty Russell ([email protected]) wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 11:45 -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > * Rusty Russell ([email protected]) wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 16:26 -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > > > plain text document attachment (module.c-sort-module-list.patch)
> > > > A race that appears both in /proc/modules and in kallsyms: if, between the
> > > > seq file reads, the process is put to sleep and at this moment a module is
> > > > or removed from the module list, the listing will skip an amount of
> > > > modules/symbols corresponding to the amount of elements present in the unloaded
> > > > module, but at the current position in the list if the iteration is located
> > > > after the removed module.
> > > >
> > > > The cleanest way I found to deal with this problem is to sort the module list.
> > > > We can then keep the old struct module * as the old iterator, knowing the it may
> > > > be removed between the seq file reads, but we only use it as "get next". If it
> > > > is not present in the module list, the next pointer will be used.
> > > >
> > > > By doing this, removing a given module will now only fuzz the output related to
> > > > this specific module, not any random module anymore. Since modprobe uses
> > > > /proc/modules, it might be important to make sure multiple concurrent running
> > > > modprobes won't interfere with each other.
> > >
> > > You've reduced, but not eliminated, the problem. A new module inserted
> > > is quite likely to reuse the same address.
> > >
> >
> > Hi Rusty,
> >
> > Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I think it would not be a problem:
> >
> > - seq_read() makes sure that a buffer large enough is available so that
> > m_show() can fully extract and print the information relative to 1
> > module.
> > - m_start() and m_stop() takes the module_mutex, therefore within one
> > seq_read(), once m_start has returned, the struct module * that we
> > have is valid and will be consistent during the whole seq_read
> > operation.
> > - If a module is removed, and then a different one is inserted at the
> > same address, while we are between two seq_reads for this given struct
> > module address, the seq_reads will copy to user-space the information
> > that is still in the buffer for the _first_ struct module encountered,
> > not the new one.
> > - After that, iteration will continue to the new struct module address,
> > effectively skipping the newly inserted module.
>
> Indeed, I thought that this was a general problem: the seq_list code was
> never intended to work on modifiable lists unless you get them in one
> big read.
>
> If we accept this problem, what do we do about all the other users?
>
Hum, I guess it would be best for them to switch to the proposed seq
sorted list too. I think that having one example (module.c) that shows
well how this works will be an incentive for other developers to port
their seq_file code to the sorted list (I am thinking, among others,
about kallsyms).
Mathieu
> Rusty.
>
--
Mathieu Desnoyers
Computer Engineering Ph.D. Student, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
