Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org designates 23.128.96.18 as permitted sender) client-ip=23.128.96.18;
Date:   Thu, 16 Apr 2020 14:22:35 +0200
From:   Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
To:     Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc:     Yufen Yu <yuyufen@huawei.com>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
        axboe@kernel.dk, tj@kernel.org, bvanassche@acm.org, tytso@mit.edu,
        gregkh@linuxfoundation.org, linux-block@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/8] bdi: add a ->dev_name field to struct
 backing_dev_info
Message-ID: <20200416122235.GA26982@lst.de>
References: <20200416071519.807660-1-hch@lst.de> <20200416071519.807660-4-hch@lst.de> <5bfcd35a-2463-3769-be93-911c4e3c38bb@huawei.com> <20200416120223.GI23739@quack2.suse.cz> <20200416121901.GA26483@lst.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20200416121901.GA26483@lst.de>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17 (2007-11-01)
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Precedence: bulk

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 02:19:01PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 02:02:23PM +0200, Jan Kara wrote:
> > Yes, that can indeed happen. E.g. I remember that drivers/scsi/sd.c calls
> > device_add_disk() + del_gendisk() repeatedly for one request_queue and that
> > would result in leaking the name (and possibly cause use-after-free
> > issues).
> 
> Sd calls device_add_disk once in ->probe, and del_gendisk once in
> sd_remove.  Note that sd_probe allocates a new scsi_disk structure and
> a new gendisk everytime, but it does indeed reuse the request_queue
> and thus bdi.
> 
> > I think dev_name has to be just a static array inside
> > backing_dev_info which gets overwritten on reregistration. The question is
> > how big should be this array... Some grepping shows that 40 bytes should be
> > enough for everybody except fs/vboxsf/super.c which puts 'fc->source' into
> > the name which can be presumably rather large. Anyway, I'd make it 40 and
> > just truncate it case in case it does not fit. bdi_dev_name() is used for
> > informational purposes anyway...
> 
> We could just make it a variable sized array at the end of the structure
> and size it based on the len.

Which doesn't always work as the size might not always be the same.
But I think the fundamental problem is that we are trying to re-register
previous unregistered bdis.  We really should not have bdi_alloc
separate from bdi_register and solve this properly.