• Eric Biggers's avatar
    ext4: fix deadlock allocating crypto bounce page from mempool · 547c556f
    Eric Biggers authored
    ext4_writepages() on an encrypted file has to encrypt the data, but it
    can't modify the pagecache pages in-place, so it encrypts the data into
    bounce pages and writes those instead.  All bounce pages are allocated
    from a mempool using GFP_NOFS.
    
    This is not correct use of a mempool, and it can deadlock.  This is
    because GFP_NOFS includes __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM, which enables the "never
    fail" mode for mempool_alloc() where a failed allocation will fall back
    to waiting for one of the preallocated elements in the pool.
    
    But since this mode is used for all a bio's pages and not just the
    first, it can deadlock waiting for pages already in the bio to be freed.
    
    This deadlock can be reproduced by patching mempool_alloc() to pretend
    that pool->alloc() always fails (so that it always falls back to the
    preallocations), and then creating an encrypted file of size > 128 KiB.
    
    Fix it by only using GFP_NOFS for the first page in the bio.  For
    subsequent pages just use GFP_NOWAIT, and if any of those fail, just
    submit the bio and start a new one.
    
    This will need to be fixed in f2fs too, but that's less straightforward.
    
    Fixes: c9af28fd ("ext4 crypto: don't let data integrity writebacks fail with ENOMEM")
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20191231181149.47619-1-ebiggers@kernel.orgSigned-off-by: default avatarTheodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
    547c556f
page-io.c 15.2 KB