Re: Oops/Warning report for the week of March 28th 2008

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> Is there something obvious that I'm missing? I'd really like to see the 
> whole posting that the oops came from. Do you save the originals or even 
> just message ID's from the ones you pick from emails?

Hmm. Definitely not from the kernel mailing list. I'm intrigued, where did 
that oops #5814 come from (picked a recent one at random)?

The thing is recent, and oopses on "mutex_lock(dev->mutex)" in 
input_release_device. In particular, the path *seems* to be this one:

  evdev_release ->
    evdev_ungrab ->
      input_release_device ->
        mutex_lock ->
          mutex_lock_nested ->
            __mutex_lock_common ->
              list_add_tail(&waiter.list, &lock->wait_list)

where "lock->wait_list.prev" seems to be 0x6b6b6b6b6b6b6b6b, which is the 
use-after-free poison pattern.

(In fact, I think the access that actually oopses is when the 
debug version of __list_add() does

	if (unlikely(prev->next != next)) {

because that "prev" pointer is crap).

So it seems that when input_release_device() does:

	struct input_dev *dev = handle->dev;

	mutex_lock(&dev->mutex);

the "dev" it uses has already been released. And this only shows up as a 
problem when you have slab debugging turned on (like the Fedora kernels 
do, thank you all Fedora guys).

The odd thing is that I don't think any of this code has really changed 
recently. 

			Linus