linux/fs/tracefs
Linus Torvalds 43aa6f97c2 eventfs: Get rid of dentry pointers without refcounts
The eventfs inode had pointers to dentries (and child dentries) without
actually holding a refcount on said pointer.  That is fundamentally
broken, and while eventfs tried to then maintain coherence with dentries
going away by hooking into the '.d_iput' callback, that doesn't actually
work since it's not ordered wrt lookups.

There were two reasonms why eventfs tried to keep a pointer to a dentry:

 - the creation of a 'events' directory would actually have a stable
   dentry pointer that it created with tracefs_start_creating().

   And it needed that dentry when tearing it all down again in
   eventfs_remove_events_dir().

   This use is actually ok, because the special top-level events
   directory dentries are actually stable, not just a temporary cache of
   the eventfs data structures.

 - the 'eventfs_inode' (aka ei) needs to stay around as long as there
   are dentries that refer to it.

   It then used these dentry pointers as a replacement for doing
   reference counting: it would try to make sure that there was only
   ever one dentry associated with an event_inode, and keep a child
   dentry array around to see which dentries might still refer to the
   parent ei.

This gets rid of the invalid dentry pointer use, and renames the one
valid case to a different name to make it clear that it's not just any
random dentry.

The magic child dentry array that is kind of a "reverse reference list"
is simply replaced by having child dentries take a ref to the ei.  As
does the directory dentries.  That makes the broken use case go away.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/202401291043.e62e89dc-oliver.sang@intel.com/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20240131185513.280463000@goodmis.org

Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Ajay Kaher <ajay.kaher@broadcom.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Fixes: c1504e5102 ("eventfs: Implement eventfs dir creation functions")
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt (Google) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
2024-02-01 10:31:17 -05:00
..
event_inode.c eventfs: Get rid of dentry pointers without refcounts 2024-02-01 10:31:17 -05:00
inode.c eventfs: Clean up dentry ops and add revalidate function 2024-02-01 10:31:17 -05:00
internal.h eventfs: Get rid of dentry pointers without refcounts 2024-02-01 10:31:17 -05:00
Makefile eventfs: Implement eventfs dir creation functions 2023-07-30 18:13:33 -04:00