Re: splice: infinite busy loop lockup bug

From: Al Viro
Date: Fri Aug 07 2020 - 08:27:48 EST


On Fri, Aug 07, 2020 at 07:35:08PM +0900, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> syzbot is reporting hung task at pipe_release() [1], for for_each_bvec() from
> iterate_bvec() from iterate_all_kinds() from iov_iter_alignment() from
> ext4_unaligned_io() from ext4_dio_write_iter() from ext4_file_write_iter() from
> call_write_iter() from do_iter_readv_writev() from do_iter_write() from
> vfs_iter_write() from iter_file_splice_write() falls into infinite busy loop
> with pipe->mutex held.
>
> The reason of falling into infinite busy loop is that iter_file_splice_write()
> for some reason generates "struct bio_vec" entry with .bv_len=0 and .bv_offset=0
> while for_each_bvec() cannot handle .bv_len == 0.

broken in 1bdc76aea115 "iov_iter: use bvec iterator to implement iterate_bvec()",
unless I'm misreading it...

Zero-length segments are not disallowed; it's not all that hard to filter them
out in iter_file_splice_write(), but the intent had always been to have
iterate_all_kinds() et.al. able to cope with those.

How are these pipe_buffers with ->len == 0 generated in that reproducer, BTW?
There might be something else fishy going on...