Michal Rábek 81531bdea9 scsi: sg: Fix occasional bogus elapsed time that exceeds timeout
[ Upstream commit 0e16776542 ]

A race condition was found in sg_proc_debug_helper(). It was observed on
a system using an IBM LTO-9 SAS Tape Drive (ULTRIUM-TD9) and monitoring
/proc/scsi/sg/debug every second. A very large elapsed time would
sometimes appear. This is caused by two race conditions.

We reproduced the issue with an IBM ULTRIUM-HH9 tape drive on an x86_64
architecture. A patched kernel was built, and the race condition could
not be observed anymore after the application of this patch. A
reproducer C program utilising the scsi_debug module was also built by
Changhui Zhong and can be viewed here:

https://github.com/MichaelRabek/linux-tests/blob/master/drivers/scsi/sg/sg_race_trigger.c

The first race happens between the reading of hp->duration in
sg_proc_debug_helper() and request completion in sg_rq_end_io().  The
hp->duration member variable may hold either of two types of
information:

 #1 - The start time of the request. This value is present while
      the request is not yet finished.

 #2 - The total execution time of the request (end_time - start_time).

If sg_proc_debug_helper() executes *after* the value of hp->duration was
changed from #1 to #2, but *before* srp->done is set to 1 in
sg_rq_end_io(), a fresh timestamp is taken in the else branch, and the
elapsed time (value type #2) is subtracted from a timestamp, which
cannot yield a valid elapsed time (which is a type #2 value as well).

To fix this issue, the value of hp->duration must change under the
protection of the sfp->rq_list_lock in sg_rq_end_io().  Since
sg_proc_debug_helper() takes this read lock, the change to srp->done and
srp->header.duration will happen atomically from the perspective of
sg_proc_debug_helper() and the race condition is thus eliminated.

The second race condition happens between sg_proc_debug_helper() and
sg_new_write(). Even though hp->duration is set to the current time
stamp in sg_add_request() under the write lock's protection, it gets
overwritten by a call to get_sg_io_hdr(), which calls copy_from_user()
to copy struct sg_io_hdr from userspace into kernel space. hp->duration
is set to the start time again in sg_common_write(). If
sg_proc_debug_helper() is called between these two calls, an arbitrary
value set by userspace (usually zero) is used to compute the elapsed
time.

To fix this issue, hp->duration must be set to the current timestamp
again after get_sg_io_hdr() returns successfully. A small race window
still exists between get_sg_io_hdr() and setting hp->duration, but this
window is only a few instructions wide and does not result in observable
issues in practice, as confirmed by testing.

Additionally, we fix the format specifier from %d to %u for printing
unsigned int values in sg_proc_debug_helper().

Signed-off-by: Michal Rábek <mrabek@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Tomas Henzl <thenzl@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Changhui Zhong <czhong@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Ewan D. Milne <emilne@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: John Meneghini <jmeneghi@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Tomas Henzl <thenzl@redhat.com>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251212160900.64924-1-mrabek@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
2026-01-17 16:35:33 +01:00
2026-01-17 16:35:31 +01:00
2022-09-28 09:02:20 +02:00
2025-02-19 14:53:27 -07:00
2026-01-11 15:26:20 +01:00
2024-03-18 03:36:32 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.
Description
No description provided
Readme 6.3 GiB
Languages
C 97.1%
Assembly 1%
Shell 0.6%
Rust 0.4%
Python 0.4%
Other 0.3%