Re: kernel BUG at fs/xfs/xfs_aops.c:853! in kernel 4.13 rc6

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On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 05:14:41PM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> Looking at the code it appears ext4, f2fs, and xfs shutdown path
> implements revoking a bdev from a filesystem.  Further if the ext4
> implementation is anything to go by it looks like something we could
> generalize into the vfs.

There are two things which the current file system shutdown paths do.
The first is that they prevent the file system from attempting to
write to the bdev.  That's all very file system specific, and can't be
generalized into the VFS.

The second thing they do is they cause system calls which might modify
the file system to return an error.  Currently operations that might
result in _reads_ are not shutdown, so it's not a true revoke(2)
functionality ala *BSD.  I assume that's what you are talking about
generalizing into the VFS.  Personally, I would prefer to see us
generalize something like vhangup() but which works on a file
descriptor, not just a TTY.  That it is, it disconnects the file
descriptor entirely from the hardware / file system so in the case of
the tty, it can be used by other login session, and in the case of the
file descriptor belonging to a file system, it stops the file system
from being unmounted.

The reason why I want to see something which actually does disconnect
the file descriptor and replaces the CWD for processes is because the
shutdown path is inherently a fairly violent procedure.  It forcibly
disconnects the file system from the block device, which means we
can't do a clean unmount.  If the block device has disappeared, we
don't have a choice, and that's the only thing we can do.

But if the USB thumb drive hasn't been yanked out yet, it would be
nice to simply disconnect everything at the file descriptor level,
then do a normal umount in all of the namespaces.  This will allow the
file system to be cleanly unmounted, which means it will work for
those file systems which don't have journals.  (The ext4/btrfs/xfs
shutdown paths rely on the file system's journalling capability
because it causes the block device to look like the system had been
powered off, and so you have to replay the journal when file system is
remounted.  That's fine, but it's not going to work on file systems
like VFAT, or worse, on NTFS, where we don't correctly support the
native file system's logging capability, so power-fail or a forced
shutdown may end up corrupting the file system enough that you have
boot into Windows to run CHKDSK.EXE in order clean it up.)

> I won't call this a security regression with user namespaces, or a mount
> namespace specific issue as it appears any process that can open a file
> has always been able to trigger this.  That said it does appear this has
> gone from a theoretical issue to an actuall problem so it is most
> definitely time to address and fix this.

The reason why this has started become a really painful issue is that
mount namespaces are extremely painful to debug.  You can't iterate
over all of the possible namespaces, without having to iterate over
every process and every thread's /proc/*/mounts.  So if there are 10
mount namespaces, but 10,000 threads, that's 10,000 /proc/*/mounts
file that you have to examine individually, just to *find* that needle
in the haystack which is keeping the mount pinned.

And there is at least one system daemon where when it starts, it opens
a new mount namespace.  Which means if you happen to have a USB
thumbdrive mounted when you restart that system daemon, it is not at
all obvious what you need to do to unmount the USB thumb drive.  And
yes, any process can open a file, but people at least knew how to find
it by using lsof.  So perhaps this could be solved partially by better
tooling, but I would argue that having userspace do a brute force
search through all of /proc/*/fd/* actually wasn't particularly clean,
either.  We've lived with it, true.  But perhaps it's time to do
something better?

And in the case where the system daemon only accidentally captured the
USB thumb drive by forking a mount namespace, it would be *definitely*
nice if we could simply make the mount disappear, instead of what we
have to today, which is kill the system daemon, unmount the USB thumb
drive, and then restart the system daemon.  (Once, that is, you have
figured what is going on first.  Often, you end up reporting an ext4
bug to the ext4 maintainer first, because you think it's an ext4 bug
that ext4 is refusing to unmount the file system.  After all, you are
an experienced system administrator, so you *know* that *nothing*
could *possibly* be keeping the file system busy.  lsof said so.  :-)

> Ted, Aleksa would either of you be interested in generalizing what ext4,
> f2fs, and xfs does now and working to put a good interface on it?  I can
> help especially with review but for the short term I am rather booked.

Unfortunately, I have way too much travel coming up in the short term,
so I probably won't have to take on a new project until at least
mid-to-late-November at the earliest.  Aleska, do you have time?  I
can consult on a design, but I have zero coding time for the next
couple of weeks.

	     	    	       	       	  - Ted

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