When I rewrote tty ldisc code to use proper reference counts (commits
65b770468e and cbe9352fa0) in order to avoid a race with hangup, the
test-program that Eric Biederman used to trigger the original problem
seems to have exposed another long-standing bug: the hangup code did the
'tty_ldisc_halt()' to stop any buffer flushing activity, but unlike the
other call sites it never actually flushed any pending work.
As a result, if you get just the right timing, the pending work may be
just about to execute (ie the timer has already triggered and thus
cancel_delayed_work() was a no-op), when we then re-initialize the ldisc
from under it.
That, in turn, results in various random problems, usually seen as a
NULL pointer dereference in run_timer_softirq() or a BUG() in
worker_thread (but it can be almost anything).
Fix it by adding the required 'flush_scheduled_work()' after doing the
tty_ldisc_halt() (this also requires us to move the ldisc halt to before
taking the ldisc mutex in order to avoid a deadlock with the workqueue
executing do_tty_hangup, which requires the mutex).
The locking should be cleaned up one day (the requirement to do this
outside the ldisc_mutex is very annoying, and weakens the lock), but
that's a larger and separate undertaking.
Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Tested-by: Xiaotian Feng <xtfeng@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Yanmin Zhang <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>
Tested-by: Dave Young <hidave.darkstar@gmail.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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