• Andrew Morton's avatar
    lib/idr.c: use kmem_cache_zalloc() for the idr_layer cache · 5b019e99
    Andrew Morton authored
    David points out that the idr_remove_all() function returns unused slabs
    to the kmem cache, but needs to zero them first or else they will be
    uninitialized upon next use.  This causes crashes which have been observed
    in the firewire subsystem.
    
    He fixed this by zeroing the object before freeing it in idr_remove_all().
    
    But we agree that simply removing the constructor and zeroing the object
    at allocation time is simpler than relying upon slab constructor machinery
    and might even be faster.
    
    This problem was introduced by "idr: make idr_remove rcu-safe" (commit
    cf481c20), which was first released in
    2.6.27.
    
    There are no known codesites which trigger this bug in 2.6.27 or 2.6.28.
    The post-2.6.28 firewire changes are the only known triggerer.
    
    There might of course be not-yet-discovered triggerers in 2.6.27 and
    2.6.28, and there might be out-of-tree triggerers which are added to those
    kernel versions.  I'll let the -stable guys decide whether they want to
    backport this fix.
    Reported-by: default avatarDavid Moore <dcm@acm.org>
    Cc: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>
    Cc: Nadia Derbey <Nadia.Derbey@bull.net>
    Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@us.ibm.com>
    Cc: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
    Cc: Kristian Hgsberg <krh@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarPekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
    Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    5b019e99
idr.c 20.5 KB