close() of an flock'd file is not atomic
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Thu Mar 8 20:39:10 UTC 2012
On Wednesday, March 07, 2012 1:18:07 pm John Baldwin wrote:
> So I ran into this problem at work. Suppose you have a process that opens a
> read-write file descriptor with O_EXLOCK (so it has an flock()). It then
> writes out a binary into that file. Another process wants to execve() the
> file when it is ready, so it opens the file with O_EXLOCK (or O_SHLOCK), and
> will call execve() once it has locked the file. In theory, what should happen
> is that the second process should wait until the first process has finished
> and called close(). In practice what happens is that I occasionally see the
> second process fail with ETXTBUSY.
>
> The bug is that the vn_closefile() does the VOP_ADVLOCK() to unlock the file
> separately from the call to vn_close() which drops the writecount. Thus, the
> second process can do an open() and flock() of the file and subsequently call
> execve() after the first process has done the VOP_ADVLOCK(), but before it
> calls into vn_close(). In fact, since vn_close() requires a write lock on the
> vnode, this turns out to not be too hard to reproduce at all. Below is a
> simple test program that reproduces this constantly. To use, copy /bin/test
> to some other file (e.g. /tmp/foo) and make it writable (chmod a+w), then run
> ./flock_close_race /tmp/foo.
>
> The "fix" I came up with is to defer calling VOP_ADVLOCK() to release the lock
> until after vn_close() executes. However, even with that fix applied, my test
> case still fails. Now it is because open() with a given lock flag is
> non-atomic in that the open(O_RDWR) will call vn_open() and bump v_writecount
> before it blocks on the lock due to O_EXLOCK, so even though the 'exec_child'
> process has the fd locked, the writecount can still be bumped. One gross hack
> would be to defer the bump of the writecount to the caller of vn_open() if the
> caller passes in O_EXLOCK or O_SHLOCK, but that's a really gross kludge, plus
> it doesn't actually work. I ended up moving acquiring the lock into
> vn_open_cred(). The current patch I'm testing has both of these approaches,
> but the first one is #if 0'd out, and the second is #if 1'd.
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/flock_open_close.patch
Based on some feedback from Konstantin, I've fixed some issues in the failure
path handling for VOP_ADVLOCK(). I've also removed the #if 0'd code mentioned
above, so the patch is now the actual change that I'm testing. So far it
handles both my workload at work and my test program without any issues.
--
John Baldwin
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