tty: Make flush_to_ldisc() locking more robust
commit c8e33141 upstream. The locking logic in this function is extremely subtle, and it broke when we started doing potentially concurrent 'flush_to_ldisc()' calls in commit e043e42b ("pty: avoid forcing 'low_latency' tty flag"). The code in flush_to_ldisc() used to set 'tty->buf.head' to NULL, with the intention that this would then cause any other concurrent calls to not do anything (locking note: we have to drop the buf.lock over the call to ->receive_buf that can block, which is why we can have concurrency here at all in the first place). It also used to set the TTY_FLUSHING bit, which would then cause any concurrent 'tty_buffer_flush()' to not free all the tty buffers and clear 'tty->buf.tail'. And with 'buf.head' being NULL, and 'buf.tail' being non-NULL, new data would never touch 'buf.head'. Does that sound a bit too subtle? It was. If another concurrent call to 'flush_to_ldisc()' were to come in, the NULL buf.head would indeed cause it to not process the buffer list, but it would still clear TTY_FLUSHING afterwards, making the buffer protection against 'tty_buffer_flush()' no longer work. So this clears it all up. We depend purely on TTY_FLUSHING for handling re-entrancy, and stop playing games with the buffer list entirely. In fact, the buffer list handling is now robust enough that we could probably stop doing the whole "protect against 'tty_buffer_flush()'" thing entirely. However, Alan also points out that we would probably be better off simplifying the locking even further, and just take the tty ldisc_mutex around all the buffer flushing calls. That seems like a good idea, but in the meantime this is a conceptually minimal fix (with the patch itself being bigger than required just to clean the code up and make it readable). This fixes keyboard trouble under X: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14388Reported-and-tested-by: Frédéric Meunier <fredlwm@gmail.com> Reported-and-tested-by: Boyan <btanastasov@yahoo.co.uk> Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Cc: Paul Fulghum <paulkf@microgate.com> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment