547c556f4d
ext4_writepages() on an encrypted file has to encrypt the data, but it
can't modify the pagecache pages in-place, so it encrypts the data into
bounce pages and writes those instead. All bounce pages are allocated
from a mempool using GFP_NOFS.
This is not correct use of a mempool, and it can deadlock. This is
because GFP_NOFS includes __GFP_DIRECT_RECLAIM, which enables the "never
fail" mode for mempool_alloc() where a failed allocation will fall back
to waiting for one of the preallocated elements in the pool.
But since this mode is used for all a bio's pages and not just the
first, it can deadlock waiting for pages already in the bio to be freed.
This deadlock can be reproduced by patching mempool_alloc() to pretend
that pool->alloc() always fails (so that it always falls back to the
preallocations), and then creating an encrypted file of size > 128 KiB.
Fix it by only using GFP_NOFS for the first page in the bio. For
subsequent pages just use GFP_NOWAIT, and if any of those fail, just
submit the bio and start a new one.
This will need to be fixed in f2fs too, but that's less straightforward.
Fixes: c9af28fdd449 ("ext4 crypto: don't let data integrity writebacks fail with ENOMEM")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20191231181149.47619-1-ebiggers@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
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 Restructured Text 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.