• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    pipe: remove pipe_wait() and fix wakeup race with splice · 472e5b05
    Linus Torvalds authored
    The pipe splice code still used the old model of waiting for pipe IO by
    using a non-specific "pipe_wait()" that waited for any pipe event to
    happen, which depended on all pipe IO being entirely serialized by the
    pipe lock.  So by checking the state you were waiting for, and then
    adding yourself to the wait queue before dropping the lock, you were
    guaranteed to see all the wakeups.
    
    Strictly speaking, the actual wakeups were not done under the lock, but
    the pipe_wait() model still worked, because since the waiter held the
    lock when checking whether it should sleep, it would always see the
    current state, and the wakeup was always done after updating the state.
    
    However, commit 0ddad21d ("pipe: use exclusive waits when reading or
    writing") split the single wait-queue into two, and in the process also
    made the "wait for event" code wait for _two_ wait queues, and that then
    showed a race with the wakers that were not serialized by the pipe lock.
    
    It's only splice that used that "pipe_wait()" model, so the problem
    wasn't obvious, but Josef Bacik reports:
    
     "I hit a hang with fstest btrfs/187, which does a btrfs send into
      /dev/null. This works by creating a pipe, the write side is given to
      the kernel to write into, and the read side is handed to a thread that
      splices into a file, in this case /dev/null.
    
      The box that was hung had the write side stuck here [pipe_write] and
      the read side stuck here [splice_from_pipe_next -> pipe_wait].
    
      [ more details about pipe_wait() scenario ]
    
      The problem is we're doing the prepare_to_wait, which sets our state
      each time, however we can be woken up either with reads or writes. In
      the case above we race with the WRITER waking us up, and re-set our
      state to INTERRUPTIBLE, and thus never break out of schedule"
    
    Josef had a patch that avoided the issue in pipe_wait() by just making
    it set the state only once, but the deeper problem is that pipe_wait()
    depends on a level of synchonization by the pipe mutex that it really
    shouldn't.  And the whole "wait for any pipe state change" model really
    isn't very good to begin with.
    
    So rather than trying to work around things in pipe_wait(), remove that
    legacy model of "wait for arbitrary pipe event" entirely, and actually
    create functions that wait for the pipe actually being readable or
    writable, and can do so without depending on the pipe lock serializing
    everything.
    
    Fixes: 0ddad21d ("pipe: use exclusive waits when reading or writing")
    Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/bfa88b5ad6f069b2b679316b9e495a970130416c.1601567868.git.josef@toxicpanda.com/Reported-by: default avatarJosef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
    Reviewed-and-tested-by: default avatarJosef Bacik <josef@toxicpanda.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    472e5b05
pipe.c 33.8 KB