Commit cb424ffe authored Jul 06, 2012 by Kay Sievers Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman Jul 06, 2012

kmsg: properly handle concurrent non-blocking read() from /proc/kmsg



The /proc/kmsg read() interface is internally simply wired up to a sequence
of syslog() syscalls, which might are racy between their checks and actions,
regarding concurrency.

In the (very uncommon) case of concurrent readers of /dev/kmsg, relying on
usual O_NONBLOCK behavior, the recently introduced mutex might block an
O_NONBLOCK reader in read(), when poll() returns for it, but another process
has already read the data in the meantime. We've seen that while running
artificial test setups and tools that "fight" about /proc/kmsg data.

This restores the original /proc/kmsg behavior, where in case of concurrent
read()s, poll() might wake up but the read() syscall will just return 0 to
the caller, while another process has "stolen" the data.

This is in the general case not the expected behavior, but it is the exact
same one, that can easily be triggered with a 3.4 kernel, and some tools
might just rely on it.

The mutex is not needed, the original integrity issue which introduced it,
is in the meantime covered by:
  "fill buffer with more than a single message for SYSLOG_ACTION_READ"
  116e90b2

Cc: Yuanhan Liu <yuanhan.liu@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Kay Sievers <kay@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

parent 43a73a50

kernel/printk.c

+1 −8

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -1021,7 +1021,6 @@ int do_syslog(int type, char __user *buf, int len, bool from_file)
		{
		bool clear = false;
		static int saved_console_loglevel = -1;
		static DEFINE_MUTEX(syslog_mutex);
		int error;

		error = check_syslog_permissions(type, from_file);
		@@ -1048,17 +1047,11 @@ int do_syslog(int type, char __user *buf, int len, bool from_file)
		error = -EFAULT;
		goto out;
		}
		error = mutex_lock_interruptible(&syslog_mutex);
		if (error)
		goto out;
		error = wait_event_interruptible(log_wait,
		syslog_seq != log_next_seq);
		if (error) {
		mutex_unlock(&syslog_mutex);
		if (error)
		goto out;
		}
		error = syslog_print(buf, len);
		mutex_unlock(&syslog_mutex);
		break;
		/* Read/clear last kernel messages */
		case SYSLOG_ACTION_READ_CLEAR:

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