On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 07:59:19PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: > I _think_ I see what the issue is. It seems that an assumption made in > this commit might be wrong and we're missing a mnt_add_count() bump that > we would otherwise have gotten if we've moved the failure handling into > the unlazy helpers themselves. > > Al, does that sound plausible? mnt_add_count() on _what_? Failure in legitimize_links() ends up with nd->path.mnt zeroed, in both callers. So which vfsmount would be affected? Rules: in RCU mode: no mounts pinned out of RCU mode: nd->path.mnt and all nd->stack[i].link.mnt for i below nd->depth are either NULL or pinned Transition from RCU to non-RCU mode happens in try_to_unlazy() and try_to_unlazy_next(). References (if any) are dropped by eventual terminate_walk() (after that the contents of nameidata is junk). __legitimize_mnt() is the primitive for pinning. Return values: 0 -- successfully pinned (or given NULL as an argument) 1 -- failed, refcount not affected -1 -- failed, refcount bumped. It stays in RCU mode in all cases. One user is __legitimize_path(); it also stays in RCU mode. If it fails to legitimize path->mnt, it will zero it *IF* __legitimize_mnt() reports that refcount hadn't been taken. In all other cases, path->mnt is pinned. IOW, the caller is responsible for path_put() regardless of the outcome. Another user is legitimize_mnt(). _That_ will make sure that refcount is unaffected in case of failure (IOW, if __legitimize_mnt() reports failure with refcount bumped, we drop out of RCU mode, do mntput() and go back). On failure in legitimize_links() we either leave nd->depth equal to zero (in which case all nd->stack[...].link.mnt are to be ignored) or we set it one higher than the last attempted legitimize_path() in there. In the latter case, all entries in nd->stack below the value we put into nd->depth had legitimize_path() called (and thus have ->mnt either NULL or pinned) and everything starting from nd->depth is to be ignored. nd->path handling: 1) Callers of legitimize_links() are responsible for zeroing nd->path.mnt on legitimize_links() failure. Both do that, AFAICS. 2) in try_to_unlazy() we proceed to call legitimize_path() on nd->path. Once that call is done, we have nd->path.mnt pinned or NULL, so nothing further is needed with it. 3) in try_to_unlazy_next() we use legitimize_mnt() instead. Failure of that is handled by zeroing nd->path.mnt; success means that nd->path.mnt is pinned and should be left alone. We could use __legitimize_mnt() in try_to_unlazy_next() (basically, substitute the body of legitimize_mnt() there and massage it a bit), but that ends up being harder to follow: res = __legitimize_mnt(nd->path.mnt, nd->m_seq); if (unlikely(res)) { if (res < 0) // pinned, leave it there goto out1; else // not pinned, zero it goto out2; } instead of if (unlikely(!legitimize_mnt(nd->path.mnt, nd->m_seq))) goto out2; we have now.