On Sun, Mar 8, 2020 at 10:41 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The cred_guard_mutex is problematic. The cred_guard_mutex is held > over the userspace accesses as the arguments from userspace are read. > The cred_guard_mutex is held of PTRACE_EVENT_EXIT as the the other > threads are killed. The cred_guard_mutex is held over > "put_user(0, tsk->clear_child_tid)" in exit_mm(). > > Any of those can result in deadlock, as the cred_guard_mutex is held > over a possible indefinite userspace waits for userspace. > > Add exec_update_mutex that is only held over exec updating process > with the new contents of exec, so that code that needs not to be > confused by exec changing the mm and the cred in ways that can not > happen during ordinary execution of a process. > > The plan is to switch the users of cred_guard_mutex to > exec_udpate_mutex one by one. This lets us move forward while still > being careful and not introducing any regressions. [...] > @@ -1034,6 +1035,11 @@ static int exec_mmap(struct mm_struct *mm) > return -EINTR; > } > } > + > + ret = mutex_lock_killable(&tsk->signal->exec_update_mutex); > + if (ret) > + return ret; We're already holding the old mmap_sem, and now nest the exec_update_mutex inside it; but then while still holding the exec_update_mutex, we do mmput(), which can e.g. end up in ksm_exit(), which can do down_write(&mm->mmap_sem) from __ksm_exit(). So I think at least lockdep will be unhappy, and I'm not sure whether it's an actual problem or not.
