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authorNeil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>2010-01-17 17:16:12 +0000
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2010-01-19 01:59:01 -0800
commitde4ef86cfce60d2250111f34f8a084e769f23b16 (patch)
tree097eb01bbe375ab3a14f6f7135901b160206f602 /lib/bust_spinlocks.c
parent0a931acfd19faf13129a22a46c06f330ecc2a4a3 (diff)
dccp: fix dccp rmmod when kernel configured to use slub
Hey all- I was tinkering with dccp recently and noticed that I BUG halted the kernel when I rmmod-ed the dccp module. The bug halt occured because the page that I passed to kfree failed the PageCompound and PageSlab test in the slub implementation of kfree. I tracked the problem down to the following set of events: 1) dccp, unlike all other uses of kmem_cache_create, allocates a string dynamically when registering a slab cache. This allocated string is freed when the cache is destroyed. 2) Normally, (1) is not an issue, but when Slub is in use, it is possible that caches are 'merged'. This process causes multiple caches of simmilar configuration to use the same cache data structure. When this happens, the new name of the cache is effectively dropped. 3) (2) results in kmem_cache_name returning an ambigous value (i.e. ccid_kmem_cache_destroy, which uses this fuction to retrieve the name pointer for freeing), is no longer guaranteed that the string it assigned is what is returned. 4) If such merge event occurs, ccid_kmem_cache_destroy frees the wrong pointer, which trips over the BUG in the slub implementation of kfree (since its likely not a slab allocation, but rather a pointer into the static string table section. So, what to do about this. At first blush this is pretty clearly a leak in the information that slub owns, and as such a slub bug. Unfortunately, theres no really good way to fix it, without exposing slub specific implementation details to the generic slab interface. Also, even if we could fix this in slub cleanly, I think the RCU free option would force us to do lots of string duplication, not only in slub, but in every slab allocator. As such, I'd like to propose this solution. Basically, I just move the storage for the kmem cache name to the ccid_operations structure. In so doing, we don't have to do the kstrdup or kfree when we allocate/free the various caches for dccp, and so we avoid the problem, by storing names with static memory, rather than heap, the way all other calls to kmem_cache_create do. I've tested this out myself here, and it solves the problem quite well. Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com> Acked-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'lib/bust_spinlocks.c')
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