debugfs: prevent access to possibly dead file_operations at file open

Nothing prevents a dentry found by path lookup before a return of
__debugfs_remove() to actually get opened after that return. Now, after
the return of __debugfs_remove(), there are no guarantees whatsoever
regarding the memory the corresponding inode's file_operations object
had been kept in.

Since __debugfs_remove() is seldomly invoked, usually from module exit
handlers only, the race is hard to trigger and the impact is very low.

A discussion of the problem outlined above as well as a suggested
solution can be found in the (sub-)thread rooted at

  http://lkml.kernel.org/g/20130401203445.GA20862@ZenIV.linux.org.uk
  ("Yet another pipe related oops.")

Basically, Greg KH suggests to introduce an intermediate fops and
Al Viro points out that a pointer to the original ones may be stored in
->d_fsdata.

Follow this line of reasoning:
- Add SRCU as a reverse dependency of DEBUG_FS.
- Introduce a srcu_struct object for the debugfs subsystem.
- In debugfs_create_file(), store a pointer to the original
  file_operations object in ->d_fsdata.
- Make debugfs_remove() and debugfs_remove_recursive() wait for a
  SRCU grace period after the dentry has been delete()'d and before they
  return to their callers.
- Introduce an intermediate file_operations object named
  "debugfs_open_proxy_file_operations". It's ->open() functions checks,
  under the protection of a SRCU read lock, whether the dentry is still
  alive, i.e. has not been d_delete()'d and if so, tries to acquire a
  reference on the owning module.
  On success, it sets the file object's ->f_op to the original
  file_operations and forwards the ongoing open() call to the original
  ->open().
- For clarity, rename the former debugfs_file_operations to
  debugfs_noop_file_operations -- they are in no way canonical.

The choice of SRCU over "normal" RCU is justified by the fact, that the
former may also be used to protect ->i_private data from going away
during the execution of a file's readers and writers which may (and do)
sleep.

Finally, introduce the fs/debugfs/internal.h header containing some
declarations internal to the debugfs implementation.

Signed-off-by: Nicolai Stange <nicstange@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/debugfs.h b/include/linux/debugfs.h
index 981e53ab84e8..fcafe2d389f9 100644
--- a/include/linux/debugfs.h
+++ b/include/linux/debugfs.h
@@ -43,9 +43,6 @@ extern struct dentry *arch_debugfs_dir;
 
 #if defined(CONFIG_DEBUG_FS)
 
-/* declared over in file.c */
-extern const struct file_operations debugfs_file_operations;
-
 struct dentry *debugfs_create_file(const char *name, umode_t mode,
 				   struct dentry *parent, void *data,
 				   const struct file_operations *fops);