From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:42:57 +0000 (-0700) Subject: Fix NULL pointer dereference in proc_sys_compare X-Git-Tag: v2.6.27-rc8~13 X-Git-Url: http://pilppa.com/gitweb/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=d0185c0882d76b8126d4a099c7ac82b3b216d103;p=linux-2.6-omap-h63xx.git Fix NULL pointer dereference in proc_sys_compare The VFS interface for the 'd_compare()' is a bit special (read: 'odd'), because it really just essentially replaces a memcmp(). The filesystem is supposed to just compare the two names with whatever case-independent or other function. And when I say 'is supposed to', I obviously mean that 'procfs does odd things, and actually looks at the dentry that we don't even pass down, rather than just the name'. Which results in problems, because we actually call d_compare before we have even verified that the dentry is still hashed at all. And that causes a problm since the inode that procfs looks at may have been free'd and the d_inode pointer is NULL. procfs just assumes that all dentries are positive, since procfs itself never generates a negative one. But memory pressure will still result in the dentry getting torn down, and as it is removed by RCU, it still remains visible on some lists - and to d_compare. If the filesystem just did a name comparison, we wouldn't care. And we could just fix procfs to know about negative dentries too. But rather than have the low-level filesystems know about internal VFS details, just move the check for a unhashed dentry up a bit, so that we will only call d_compare on dentries that are still active. The actual oops this caused didn't look like a NULL pointer dereference because procfs did a 'container_of(inode, struct proc_inode, vfs_inode)' to get at its internal proc_inode information from the inode pointer, and accessed a field below the inode. So the oops would look something like BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at fffffffffffffff0 IP: [] proc_sys_compare+0x36/0x50 and was seen on both x86-64 (Alexey Dobriyan and Hugh Dickins) and ppc64 (Hugh Dickins). Reported-by: Alexey Dobriyan Acked-by: Hugh Dickins Cc: Al Viro Reviewed-by: "Eric W. Biederman" Signed-of-by: Linus Torvalds --- diff --git a/fs/dcache.c b/fs/dcache.c index 80e93956ace..e7a1a99b746 100644 --- a/fs/dcache.c +++ b/fs/dcache.c @@ -1395,6 +1395,10 @@ struct dentry * __d_lookup(struct dentry * parent, struct qstr * name) if (dentry->d_parent != parent) goto next; + /* non-existing due to RCU? */ + if (d_unhashed(dentry)) + goto next; + /* * It is safe to compare names since d_move() cannot * change the qstr (protected by d_lock). @@ -1410,10 +1414,8 @@ struct dentry * __d_lookup(struct dentry * parent, struct qstr * name) goto next; } - if (!d_unhashed(dentry)) { - atomic_inc(&dentry->d_count); - found = dentry; - } + atomic_inc(&dentry->d_count); + found = dentry; spin_unlock(&dentry->d_lock); break; next: