Herbert Xu
authored
Janos Haar of First NetCenter Bt. reported numerous crashes involving the NBD driver. With his help, this was tracked down to bogus bio vectors which in turn was the result of a race condition between the receive/transmit routines in the NBD driver. The bug manifests itself like this: CPU0 CPU1 do_nbd_request add req to queuelist nbd_send_request send req head for each bio kmap send nbd_read_stat nbd_find_request nbd_end_request kunmap When CPU1 finishes nbd_end_request, the request and all its associated bio's are freed. So when CPU0 calls kunmap whose argument is derived from the last bio, it may crash. Under normal circumstances, the race occurs only on the last bio. However, if an error is encountered on the remote NBD server (such as an incorrect magic number in the request), or if there were a bug in the server, it is possible for the nbd_end_request to occur any time after the request's addition to the queuelist. The fol...