drivers:tty:pty: Fix a race causing data loss on close
Remove the tty_vhangup() from the pty code and just release the redirect. The tty_vhangup() results in data loss and data out of order issues. If you write to a pty master an immediately close the pty master, the receiver might get a chunk of data dropped, but then receive some later data. That's obviously something rather unexpected for a user. It certainly confused my test program. It turns out that tty_vhangup() on the slave pty gets called from pty_close(), and that causes the data on the slave side to be flushed, but due to races more data can be copied into the slave side's buffer after that. Consider the following sequence: thread1 thread2 thread3 ------- ------- ------- | |-write data into buffer, | | n_tty buffer is filled | | along with other buffers | |-pty_close(master) | |--tty_vhangup(slave) | |---tty_ldisc_hangup() | |----n_tty_flush_buffer() | |-----reset_buffer_flags() |-n_tty_read() | |--up_read(&tty->termios_rwsem); | |------down_read(&tty->termios_rwsem) | |------clear n_tty buffer contents | |------up_read(&tty->termios_rwsem) |--tty_buffer_flush_work() | |--schedules work calling | | flush_to_ldisc() | | |-flush_to_ldisc() | |--receive_buf() | |---tty_port_default_receive_buf() | |----tty_ldisc_receive_buf() | |-----n_tty_receive_buf2() | |------n_tty_receive_buf_common() | |-------down_read(&tty->termios_rwsem) | |-------__receive_buf() | | copies data into n_tty buffer | |-------up_read(&tty->termios_rwsem) |--down_read(&tty->termios_rwsem) |--copy buffer data to user >From this sequence, you can see that thread2 writes to the buffer then only clears the part of the buffer in n_tty. The n_tty receive buffer code then copies more data into the n_tty buffer. But part of the vhangup, releasing the redirect, is still required to avoid issues with consoles running on pty slaves. So do that. As far as I can tell, that is all that should be required. Signed-off-by: Corey Minyard <cminyard@mvista.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20201124004902.1398477-3-minyard@acm.org Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Please register or sign in to comment