Re: yama_ptrace_access_check(): possible recursive locking detected

[Kees Cook]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 08/15, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 2012-08-15 at 15:01 +0200, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
>> > BTW, set_task_comm()->wmb() and memset() should die. There are
>> > not needed afaics, and the comment is misleading.
>>
>> As long as we guarantee there's always a terminating '\0',
>
> Yes, but we already have this guarantee?
>
> Unless of course some buggy code does something wrong with task->comm[],
> but nobody should do this.
>
> IOW, task->comm[TASK_COMM_LEN - 1] is always 0, no?
>
>> now strlcpy()
>> doesn't pad the result,
>
> afaics set_task_comm()->strlcpy() doesn't change the last byte too.
>
>> however if we initialize the ->comm to all 0s in
>> fork()
>
> fork() is special, yes. ->comm is copied by dup_task_struct() and
> the new task_struct can have everything in ->comm. But nobody can
> see the new task yet, and nobody can play with its ->comm.
>
> Or I misunderstood?
>
>> That barrier is indeed completely pointless as there's no pairing
>> barrier anywhere.
>
> Yes, agreed.

It sounds like get_task_comm shouldn't have locking at all then? It
should just do a length-limited copy and make sure there is a trailing
0-byte?

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Chrome OS Security
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