• Artem Bityutskiy's avatar
    UBIFS: fix a race condition · 052c2807
    Artem Bityutskiy authored
    Hu (hujianyang@huawei.com) discovered a race condition which may lead to a
    situation when UBIFS is unable to mount the file-system after an unclean
    reboot. The problem is theoretical, though.
    
    In UBIFS, we have the log, which basically a set of LEBs in a certain area. The
    log has the tail and the head.
    
    Every time user writes data to the file-system, the UBIFS journal grows, and
    the log grows as well, because we append new reference nodes to the head of the
    log. So the head moves forward all the time, while the log tail stays at the
    same position.
    
    At any time, the UBIFS master node points to the tail of the log. When we mount
    the file-system, we scan the log, and we always start from its tail, because
    this is where the master node points to. The only occasion when the tail of the
    log changes is the commit operation.
    
    The commit operation has 2 phases - "commit start" and "commit end". The former
    is relatively short, and does not involve much I/O. During this phase we mostly
    just build various in-memory lists of the things which have to be written to
    the flash media during "commit end" phase.
    
    During the commit start phase, what we do is we "clean" the log. Indeed, the
    commit operation will index all the data in the journal, so the entire journal
    "disappears", and therefore the data in the log become unneeded. So we just
    move the head of the log to the next LEB, and write the CS node there. This LEB
    will be the tail of the new log when the commit operation finishes.
    
    When the "commit start" phase finishes, users may write more data to the
    file-system, in parallel with the ongoing "commit end" operation. At this point
    the log tail was not changed yet, it is the same as it had been before we
    started the commit. The log head keeps moving forward, though.
    
    The commit operation now needs to write the new master node, and the new master
    node should point to the new log tail. After this the LEBs between the old log
    tail and the new log tail can be unmapped and re-used again.
    
    And here is the possible problem. We do 2 operations: (a) We first update the
    log tail position in memory (see 'ubifs_log_end_commit()'). (b) And then we
    write the master node (see the big lock of code in 'do_commit()').
    
    But nothing prevents the log head from moving forward between (a) and (b), and
    the log head may "wrap" now to the old log tail. And when the "wrap" happens,
    the contends of the log tail gets erased. Now a power cut happens and we are in
    trouble. We end up with the old master node pointing to the old tail, which was
    erased. And replay fails because it expects the master node to point to the
    correct log tail at all times.
    
    This patch merges the abovementioned (a) and (b) operations by moving the master
    node change code to the 'ubifs_log_end_commit()' function, so that it runs with
    the log mutex locked, which will prevent the log from being changed benween
    operations (a) and (b).
    
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 07e19dff UBIFS: remove mst_mutex
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Reported-by: default avatarhujianyang <hujianyang@huawei.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarhujianyang <hujianyang@huawei.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarArtem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>
    052c2807
log.c 19.2 KB