In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
btrfs: fix deadlock between reflink and transaction commit when using flushoncommit
When using the flushoncommit mount option, we can have a deadlock between
a transaction commit and a reflink operation that copied an inline extent
to an offset beyond the current i_size of the destination node.
The deadlock happens like this:
1) Task A clones an inline extent from inode X to an offset of inode Y
that is beyond Y's current i_size. This means we copied the inline
extent's data to a folio of inode Y that is beyond its EOF, using a
call to copy_inline_to_page();
2) Task B starts a transaction commit and calls
btrfs_start_delalloc_flush() to flush delalloc;
3) The delalloc flushing sees the new dirty folio of inode Y and when it
attempts to flush it, it ends up at extent_writepage() and sees that
the offset of the folio is beyond the i_size of inode Y, so it attempts
to invalidate the folio by calling folio_invalidate(), which ends up at
btrfs' folio invalidate callback - btrfs_invalidate_folio(). There it
tries to lock the folio's range in inode Y's extent io tree, but it
blocks since it's currently locked by task A - during a reflink we lock
the inodes and the source and destination ranges after flushing all
delalloc and waiting for ordered extent completion - after that we
don't expect to have dirty folios in the ranges, the exception is if
we have to copy an inline extent's data (because the destination offset
is not zero);
4) Task A then attempts to start a transaction to update the inode item,
and then it's blocked since the current transaction is in the
TRANS_STATE_COMMIT_START state. Therefore task A has to wait for the
current transaction to become unblocked (its state >=
TRANS_STATE_UNBLOCKED).
So task A is waiting for the transaction commit done by task B, and
the later waiting on the extent lock of inode Y that is currently
held by task A.
Syzbot recently reported this with the following stack traces:
INFO: task kworker/u8:7:1053 blocked for more than 143 seconds.
Not tainted syzkaller #0
"echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
task:kworker/u8:7 state:D stack:23520 pid:1053 tgid:1053 ppid:2 task_flags:0x4208060 flags:0x00080000
Workqueue: writeback wb_workfn (flush-btrfs-46)
Call Trace:
CWE-667