• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    vfs,proc: guarantee unique inodes in /proc · 51f0885e
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Dave Jones found another /proc issue with his Trinity tool: thanks to
    the namespace model, we can have multiple /proc dentries that point to
    the same inode, aliasing directories in /proc/<pid>/net/ for example.
    
    This ends up being a total disaster, because it acts like hardlinked
    directories, and causes locking problems.  We rely on the topological
    sort of the inodes pointed to by dentries, and if we have aliased
    directories, that odering becomes unreliable.
    
    In short: don't do this.  Multiple dentries with the same (directory)
    inode is just a bad idea, and the namespace code should never have
    exposed things this way.  But we're kind of stuck with it.
    
    This solves things by just always allocating a new inode during /proc
    dentry lookup, instead of using "iget_locked()" to look up existing
    inodes by superblock and number.  That actually simplies the code a bit,
    at the cost of potentially doing more inode [de]allocations.
    
    That said, the inode lookup wasn't free either (and did a lot of locking
    of inodes), so it is probably not that noticeable.  We could easily keep
    the old lookup model for non-directory entries, but rather than try to
    be excessively clever this just implements the minimal and simplest
    workaround for the problem.
    Reported-and-tested-by: default avatarDave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
    Analyzed-by: default avatarAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    51f0885e
inode.c 12 KB