The current version of hlist_entry_safe() fetches the pointer twice,
once to test for NULL and the other to compute the offset back to the
enclosing structure. This is OK for normal lock-based use because in
that case, the pointer cannot change. However, when the pointer is
protected by RCU (as in "rcu_dereference(p)"), then the pointer can
change at any time. This use case can result in the following sequence
of events:
1. CPU 0 invokes hlist_entry_safe(), fetches the RCU-protected
pointer as sees that it is non-NULL.
2. CPU 1 invokes hlist_del_rcu(), deleting the entry that CPU 0
just fetched a pointer to. Because this is the last entry
in the list, the pointer fetched by CPU 0 is now NULL.
3. CPU 0 refetches the pointer, obtains NULL, and then gets a
NULL-pointer crash.
This commit therefore applies gcc's "({ })" statement expression to
create a temporary variable so that the specified pointer is fetched
only once, avoiding the above sequence of events. Please note that
it is the caller's responsibility to use rcu_dereference() as needed.
This allows RCU-protected uses to work correctly without imposing
any additional overhead on the non-RCU case.
Many thanks to Eric Dumazet for spotting root cause!
Reported-by: CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Tested-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
f65846a180