On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 08:45 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> I have done some crude coccinelle patterns in the past, but they are
> subject to false positives (from when you transfer the pointer from
> RCU protection to reference-count protection) and also false negatives
> (when you atomically increment some statistic unrelated to protection).
>
> I could imagine maintaining a per-thread count of the number of outermost
> RCU read-side critical sections at runtime, and then associating that
> counter with a given pointer at rcu_dereference() time, but this would
> require either compiler magic or an API for using a pointer returned
> by rcu_dereference(). This API could in theory be enforced by sparse.
>
> Dhaval Giani might have some ideas as well, adding him to CC.
We had this fix the otherday, because tcp prequeue code hit this check :
static inline struct dst_entry *skb_dst(const struct sk_buff *skb)
{
/* If refdst was not refcounted, check we still are in a
* rcu_read_lock section
*/
WARN_ON((skb->_skb_refdst & SKB_DST_NOREF) &&
!rcu_read_lock_held() &&
!rcu_read_lock_bh_held());
return (struct dst_entry *)(skb->_skb_refdst & SKB_DST_PTRMASK);
}
( http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/davem/net.git/commit/?id=093162553c33e9479283e107b4431378271c735d )
Problem is the rcu protected pointer was escaping the rcu lock and was
then used in another thread.
What would be cool (but expensive maybe) , would be to get a cookie from
rcu_read_lock(), and check the cookie at rcu_dereference(). These
cookies would have system wide scope to catch any kind of errors.
Because a per thread counter would not catch following problem :
rcu_read_lock();
ptr = rcu_dereference(x);
if (!ptr)
return NULL;
...
rcu_read_unlock();
...
rcu_read_lock();
/* no reload of x, ptr might be now stale/freed */
if (ptr->field) { ... }
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter-devel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
