The siblings "list" is used unsafely at the moment.
Firstly, only the element on the list being changed gets locked (via the
snapshot lock), not the next and previous elements which have pointers that
are also being changed.
Secondly, if you have two or more snapshots and write to the same chunk a
second time before every snapshot has finished making its private copy of the
data, if you're unlucky, _origin_write() could attempt its list_merge() and
dereference a 'last' pointer to a pending_exception structure that has just
been freed.
Analysis reveals that the list is actually only there for reference counting.
If 5 pending_exceptions are needed in origin_write, then the 5 are joined
together into a 5-element list - without a separate list head because there's
nowhere suitable to store it. As the pending_exceptions complete, they are
removed from the list one-by-one and any contents of origin_bios get moved
across to one of the remaining pending_exceptions on the list. Whichever one
is last is detected because list_empty() is then true and the origin_bios get
submitted.
The fix proposed here uses an alternative reference counting mechanism by
choosing one of the pending_exceptions as primary and maintaining an atomic
counter there.
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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