3.2-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know. ------------------ From: Greg Thelen <gthelen@xxxxxxxxxx> commit 5f00110f7273f9ff04ac69a5f85bb535a4fd0987 upstream. The tmpfs remount logic preserves filesystem mempolicy if the mpol=M option is not specified in the remount request. A new policy can be specified if mpol=M is given. Before this patch remounting an mpol bound tmpfs without specifying mpol= mount option in the remount request would set the filesystem's mempolicy object to a freed mempolicy object. To reproduce the problem boot a DEBUG_PAGEALLOC kernel and run: # mkdir /tmp/x # mount -t tmpfs -o size=100M,mpol=interleave nodev /tmp/x # grep /tmp/x /proc/mounts nodev /tmp/x tmpfs rw,relatime,size=102400k,mpol=interleave:0-3 0 0 # mount -o remount,size=200M nodev /tmp/x # grep /tmp/x /proc/mounts nodev /tmp/x tmpfs rw,relatime,size=204800k,mpol=??? 0 0 # note ? garbage in mpol=... output above # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/x/f count=1 # panic here Panic: BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at (null) IP: [< (null)>] (null) [...] Oops: 0010 [#1] SMP DEBUG_PAGEALLOC Call Trace: mpol_shared_policy_init+0xa5/0x160 shmem_get_inode+0x209/0x270 shmem_mknod+0x3e/0xf0 shmem_create+0x18/0x20 vfs_create+0xb5/0x130 do_last+0x9a1/0xea0 path_openat+0xb3/0x4d0 do_filp_open+0x42/0xa0 do_sys_open+0xfe/0x1e0 compat_sys_open+0x1b/0x20 cstar_dispatch+0x7/0x1f Non-debug kernels will not crash immediately because referencing the dangling mpol will not cause a fault. Instead the filesystem will reference a freed mempolicy object, which will cause unpredictable behavior. The problem boils down to a dropped mpol reference below if shmem_parse_options() does not allocate a new mpol: config = *sbinfo shmem_parse_options(data, &config, true) mpol_put(sbinfo->mpol) sbinfo->mpol = config.mpol /* BUG: saves unreferenced mpol */ This patch avoids the crash by not releasing the mempolicy if shmem_parse_options() doesn't create a new mpol. How far back does this issue go? I see it in both 2.6.36 and 3.3. I did not look back further. Signed-off-by: Greg Thelen <gthelen@xxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- mm/shmem.c | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) --- a/mm/shmem.c +++ b/mm/shmem.c @@ -2121,6 +2121,7 @@ static int shmem_remount_fs(struct super unsigned long inodes; int error = -EINVAL; + config.mpol = NULL; if (shmem_parse_options(data, &config, true)) return error; @@ -2145,8 +2146,13 @@ static int shmem_remount_fs(struct super sbinfo->max_inodes = config.max_inodes; sbinfo->free_inodes = config.max_inodes - inodes; - mpol_put(sbinfo->mpol); - sbinfo->mpol = config.mpol; /* transfers initial ref */ + /* + * Preserve previous mempolicy unless mpol remount option was specified. + */ + if (config.mpol) { + mpol_put(sbinfo->mpol); + sbinfo->mpol = config.mpol; /* transfers initial ref */ + } out: spin_unlock(&sbinfo->stat_lock); return error; -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html