On 2015/11/06, Dmitry Vyukov reported a deadlock involving the splice
system call and AF_UNIX sockets,
http://lists.openwall.net/netdev/2015/11/06/24
The situation was analyzed as
(a while ago) A: socketpair()
B: splice() from a pipe to /mnt/regular_file
does sb_start_write() on /mnt
C: try to freeze /mnt
wait for B to finish with /mnt
A: bind() try to bind our socket to /mnt/new_socket_name
lock our socket, see it not bound yet
decide that it needs to create something in /mnt
try to do sb_start_write() on /mnt, block (it's
waiting for C).
D: splice() from the same pipe to our socket
lock the pipe, see that socket is connected
try to lock the socket, block waiting for A
B: get around to actually feeding a chunk from
pipe to file, try to lock the pipe. Deadlock.
on 2015/11/10 by Al Viro,
http://lists.openwall.net/netdev/2015/11/10/4
The patch fixes this by removing the kern_path_create related code from
unix_mknod and executing it as part of unix_bind prior acquiring the
readlock of the socket in question. This means that A (as used above)
will sb_start_write on /mnt before it acquires the readlock, hence, it
won't indirectly block B which first did a sb_start_write and then
waited for a thread trying to acquire the readlock. Consequently, A
being blocked by C waiting for B won't cause a deadlock anymore
(effectively, both A and B acquire two locks in opposite order in the
situation described above).
Dmitry Vyukov(<dvyukov@google.com>) tested the original patch.
Signed-off-by: Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mobileactivedefense.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>