This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled vfs,proc: guarantee unique inodes in /proc to the 3.8-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary The filename of the patch is: vfs-proc-guarantee-unique-inodes-in-proc.patch and it can be found in the queue-3.8 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. >From 51f0885e5415b4cc6535e9cdcc5145bfbc134353 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:44:04 -0700 Subject: vfs,proc: guarantee unique inodes in /proc From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> commit 51f0885e5415b4cc6535e9cdcc5145bfbc134353 upstream. Dave Jones found another /proc issue with his Trinity tool: thanks to the namespace model, we can have multiple /proc dentries that point to the same inode, aliasing directories in /proc/<pid>/net/ for example. This ends up being a total disaster, because it acts like hardlinked directories, and causes locking problems. We rely on the topological sort of the inodes pointed to by dentries, and if we have aliased directories, that odering becomes unreliable. In short: don't do this. Multiple dentries with the same (directory) inode is just a bad idea, and the namespace code should never have exposed things this way. But we're kind of stuck with it. This solves things by just always allocating a new inode during /proc dentry lookup, instead of using "iget_locked()" to look up existing inodes by superblock and number. That actually simplies the code a bit, at the cost of potentially doing more inode [de]allocations. That said, the inode lookup wasn't free either (and did a lot of locking of inodes), so it is probably not that noticeable. We could easily keep the old lookup model for non-directory entries, but rather than try to be excessively clever this just implements the minimal and simplest workaround for the problem. Reported-and-tested-by: Dave Jones <davej@xxxxxxxxxx> Analyzed-by: Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/proc/inode.c | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) --- a/fs/proc/inode.c +++ b/fs/proc/inode.c @@ -445,9 +445,10 @@ static const struct file_operations proc struct inode *proc_get_inode(struct super_block *sb, struct proc_dir_entry *de) { - struct inode *inode = iget_locked(sb, de->low_ino); + struct inode *inode = new_inode_pseudo(sb); - if (inode && (inode->i_state & I_NEW)) { + if (inode) { + inode->i_ino = de->low_ino; inode->i_mtime = inode->i_atime = inode->i_ctime = CURRENT_TIME; PROC_I(inode)->pde = de; @@ -475,7 +476,6 @@ struct inode *proc_get_inode(struct supe inode->i_fop = de->proc_fops; } } - unlock_new_inode(inode); } else pde_put(de); return inode; Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx are queue-3.8/saner-proc_get_inode-calling-conventions.patch queue-3.8/vfs-proc-guarantee-unique-inodes-in-proc.patch -- 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