reiserfs: fix race with flush_used_journal_lists and flush_journal_list
There are two locks involved in managing the journal lists. The general
reiserfs_write_lock and the journal->j_flush_mutex.
While flush_journal_list is sleeping to acquire the j_flush_mutex or to
submit a block for write, it will drop the write lock. This allows
another thread to acquire the write lock and ultimately call
flush_used_journal_lists to traverse the list of journal lists and
select one for flushing. It can select the journal_list that has just
had flush_journal_list called on it in the original thread and call it
again with the same journal_list.
The second thread then drops the write lock to acquire j_flush_mutex and
the first thread reacquires it and continues execution and eventually
clears and frees the journal list before dropping j_flush_mutex and
returning.
The second thread acquires j_flush_mutex and ends up operating on a
journal_list that has already been released. If the memory hasn't
been reused, we'll soon after hit a BUG_ON because the transaction id
has already been cleared. If it's been reused, we'll crash in other
fun ways.
Since flush_journal_list will synchronize on j_flush_mutex, we can fix
the race by taking a proper reference in flush_used_journal_lists
and checking to see if it's still valid after the mutex is taken. It's
safe to iterate the list of journal lists and pick a list with
just the write lock as long as a reference is taken on the journal list
before we drop the lock. We already have code to handle whether a
transaction has been flushed already so we can use that to handle the
race and get rid of the trans_id BUG_ON.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
1 file changed