On Sat, Jun 04, 2011 at 01:15:19AM +0100, Al Viro wrote: > Granted, sysfs_dir_pos() doesn't dereference ns; however, it does compare > with it. And ns might have been freed and reused by that point. > > I don't like what's going on there; that code looks inherently racy. > We never set ->ns[...] non-NULL outside of mount(). So it looks like > the intended behaviour is to have all ns-specific entries of that type > disappear forever from that fs instance. Having entries for _another_ > namespace to show up for a (short) while, and that only in readdir() > (lookup runs completely under sysfs_mutex, so we don't have that race > there)... Eeep... We do not have a *race* in lookup. However, any lookup done after that ->ns[...] = NULL is going to do the following: mutex_lock(&sysfs_mutex); type = sysfs_ns_type(parent_sd); ns = sysfs_info(dir->i_sb)->ns[type]; /* i.e. ns = NULL */ sd = sysfs_find_dirent(parent_sd, ns, dentry->d_name.name); which will do rather unpleasant things: for (sd = parent_sd->s_dir.children; sd; sd = sd->s_sibling) { if (ns && sd->s_ns && (sd->s_ns != ns)) continue; if (!strcmp(sd->s_name, name)) return sd; } i.e. with ns == NULL it will outright ignore sd->s_ns and look for name match and nothing else. Any sysfs node with that name will do, whatever it might have in ->s_ns. E.g. for lookups in /sys/class/net it will find the first sysfs node of network interface with that name in _some_ namespace. Back to sysfs_lookup(): /* no such entry */ if (!sd) { ret = ERR_PTR(-ENOENT); goto out_unlock; } /* attach dentry and inode */ inode = sysfs_get_inode(dir->i_sb, sd); if (!inode) { ret = ERR_PTR(-ENOMEM); goto out_unlock; } and if there was an entry from some surviving net_ns with that name, sysfs_get_inode() will cheerfully allocate an inode for us and associate it with that sd. Then we complete the lookup and return a shiny positive dentry to caller... Just what is that code supposed to do? Somehow I doubt that "after net_ns is gone, lookups for class/net/name succeed when there is an interface called name in at least one net_ns; resulting object refers to one of such interfaces, with no promises regarding which net_ns it is about" is the intended behaviour here, especially since readdir() called after that will skip all sysfs nodes with non-NULL ->s_ns, i.e. show empty class/net. Frankly, my preference would be to kill the void * nonsense, introduce a structure we'll embed into struct net (and all future tags) containing refcount and "it is doomed, skip it" flag. Purely passive refs - i.e. all they guarantee is that memory won't be freed under you. Having *active* refs (i.e. your current net->count being non-zero) contributes 1 to that counter, kfree() is done when that counter reaches zero. With info->ns[] contributing to passive refcount and exit_ns logics tagging the sucker as doomed and leaving it at that. kill_sb() would drop references, lookup and readdir check if ns is doomed and skip the entry in that case. However, it's your code and I don't know in which direction do you plan to take it. IMO it's badly overdesigned... Are you OK with the sketch above? I can probably cook a patch along those lines by tomorrow... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html