dm snapshot: fix header corruption race on invalidation

If a persistent snapshot fills up, a race can corrupt the on-disk header
which causes a crash on any future attempt to activate the snapshot
(typically while booting).  This patch fixes the race.

When the snapshot overflows, __invalidate_snapshot is called, which calls
snapshot store method drop_snapshot. It goes to persistent_drop_snapshot that
calls write_header. write_header constructs the new header in the "area"
location.

Concurrently, an existing kcopyd job may finish, call copy_callback
and commit_exception method, that goes to persistent_commit_exception.
persistent_commit_exception doesn't do locking, relying on the fact that
callbacks are single-threaded, but it can race with snapshot invalidation and
overwrite the header that is just being written while the snapshot is being
invalidated.

The result of this race is a corrupted header being written that can
lead to a crash on further reactivation (if chunk_size is zero in the
corrupted header).

The fix is to use separate memory areas for each.

See the bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461506

Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
1 file changed