From patchwork Sat May 23 08:58:45 2009 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: a suspected data race in /driver/mtd/ubi/build.c Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 22:58:45 -0000 From: Artem Bityutskiy X-Patchwork-Id: 27561 Message-Id: <1243069125.21646.21.camel@localhost.localdomain> To: =?UTF-8?Q?=ED=99=8D=EC=8B=A0?= shin hong Cc: linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 20:34 +0900, 홍신 shin hong wrote: > Hi. I am reporting a susptected data race bug at > ubi_attach_mtd_dev() in /driver/mtd/ubi/build.c . > > This function creates a kernel thread by calling > kthread_create(ubi_thread, ubi .. ). and then > it assigns ubi->thread_enabled = 1. > > However, ubi_thread() also reads ubi->thread_enabled. > This may cause data race since the execution results > would be differ depending on the scheduling. > > I think, ubi_attach_mtd_dev() should be modified to protect > the writing aceess to ubi->thread_enabled > by spin_lock(&ubi->wl_lock). > > But I do not have much background on the code. > So please check this code and let me know your opinions. Agreed, thanks for the report. I'm going to push the following patch (sorry I wrote your name without the hieroglyph characters because my vim refused them). From: Artem Bityutskiy Subject: [PATCH] UBI: fix race condition This patch fixes a minor problem where we may fail to wake upe the UBI background thread. This is not fatal at all, it may just result at sligtly worse performace for a short period of time, just because the thread will be woken up when real I/O on the UBI starts. Anywey, the issue is the race condition between 'ubi_attach_mtd_dev()' and 'ubi_thread()'. If we do not serialize them, the 'wake_up_process()' call may be done before 'ubi_thread()' went seep, but after it checked 'ubi->thread_enabled'. This issue was spotted by Shin Hong Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy --- drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c | 8 +++++++- 1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c index 4048db8..c2c7827 100644 --- a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c +++ b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c @@ -380,7 +380,7 @@ static void free_user_volumes(struct ubi_device *ubi) * @ubi: UBI device description object * * This function returns zero in case of success and a negative error code in - * case of failure. Note, this function destroys all volumes if it failes. + * case of failure. Note, this function destroys all volumes if it fails. */ static int uif_init(struct ubi_device *ubi) { @@ -872,9 +872,15 @@ int ubi_attach_mtd_dev(struct mtd_info *mtd, int ubi_num, int vid_hdr_offset) ubi->beb_rsvd_pebs); ubi_msg("max/mean erase counter: %d/%d", ubi->max_ec, ubi->mean_ec); + /* + * The below lock makes sure we do not race with 'ubi_thread()' which + * checks @ubi->thread_enabled. Otherwise we may fail to wake it up. + */ + spin_lock(&ubi->wl_lock); if (!DBG_DISABLE_BGT) ubi->thread_enabled = 1; wake_up_process(ubi->bgt_thread); + spin_unlock(&ubi->wl_lock); ubi_devices[ubi_num] = ubi; return ubi_num;