A potential deadlock can occur during registering or unregistering a
new generic netlink family between the main nl_table_lock and the
cb_lock where each thread wants the lock held by the other, as
demonstrated below.
1) Thread 1 is performing a netlink_bind() operation on a socket. As part
of this call, it will call netlink_lock_table(), incrementing the
nl_table_users count to 1.
2) Thread 2 is registering (or unregistering) a genl_family via the
genl_(un)register_family() API. The cb_lock semaphore will be taken for
writing.
3) Thread 1 will call genl_bind() as part of the bind operation to handle
subscribing to GENL multicast groups at the request of the user. It will
attempt to take the cb_lock semaphore for reading, but it will fail and
be scheduled away, waiting for Thread 2 to finish the write.
4) Thread 2 will call netlink_table_grab() during the (un)registration
call. However, as Thread 1 has incremented nl_table_users, it will not
be able to proceed, and both threads will be stuck waiting for the
other.
genl_bind() is a noop, unless a genl_family implements the mcast_bind()
function to handle setting up family-specific multicast operations. Since
no one in-tree uses this functionality as Cong pointed out, simply removing
the genl_bind() function will remove the possibility for deadlock, as there
is no attempt by Thread 1 above to take the cb_lock semaphore.
Fixes: c380d9a7af ("genetlink: pass multicast bind/unbind to families")
Suggested-by: Cong Wang <xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
Reported-by: kernel test robot <lkp@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Sean Tranchetti <stranche@codeaurora.org>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
1e82a62fec