[dm-devel] IBM request to allow unprivledged ioctls [Was: Revert "dm mpath: fix stalls when handling invalid ioctls"]

[Mike Snitzer]

On Sat, Oct 31 2015 at 11:33am -0400,
Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini at redhat.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 29/10/2015 14:18, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > > 4) dmesg shows that scsi_verify_blk_ioctl() failed for SG_IO (0x2285);
> > >    it returns -ENOIOCTLCMD, later replaced with -ENOTTY in vfs_ioctl().
> > > 
> > >     $ dmesg
> > >     <...>
> > >     [] device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 65:144.
> > >     [] device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 67:144.
> > >     [] device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 65:224.
> > >     [] device-mapper: multipath: Failing path 68:32.
> > >     [] sgio_inquiry: sending ioctl 2285 to a partition!
> > 
> > So scsi_verify_blk_ioctl() considers the ioctl invalid.
> 
> But that's wrong, I think.  It's a false positive in
> scsi_verify_blk_ioctl().
> 
> If the ioctl is valid when bdev becomes non-NULL (and it will be if
> ti->len becomes equal to i_size_read(bdev->bd_inode) >> SECTOR_SHIFT),
> you should not return -ENOIOCTLCMD aka ENOTTY, because userspace doesn't
> think the ioctls can go away and come back.  So Hannes's patch broke the
> userspace ABI. :(

Huh?  All that Hannes' patch did was add early verification of the ioctl
if there are no paths, since: there is no point queueing an ioctl that
is invalid.

But looking just now, Christoph's recent ioctl refactoring that I staged
for 4.4 does seem to subtley revert Hannes' change:
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/device-mapper/linux-dm.git/commit/?h=dm-4.4&id=40cf639be1db8cc2b8183fe2ccd390ca77b90396
With hch's change multipath_prepare_ioctl() will _not_ do early
verification of the ioctl if no paths are available (and
queue_if_no_path is configured).  Because the call to
scsi_verify_blk_ioctl() was moved to dm_blk_ioctl() and is only called
if the return is > 0 (again -ENOTCONN is being returned).

Not to mention hch's lifting of scsi_verify_blk_ioctl() into DM core's
dm_blk_ioctl() -- likely motivated by not requiring all targets to do
the call like they were doing -- should really be done as part of the
new DM target .prepare_ioctl hook.

Christoph, I think your DM ioctl changes need more review/work.. which
implies they'll very likely miss 4.4.. sorry.

Anyway, all DM specifics aside:

The point is scsi_verify_blk_ioctl() is saying the ioctl isn't valid.
It has nothing to do with the existance of a bdev or not; but everything
to do with the unprivledged user's request to issue an ioctl.

Paolo, AFAIK unprivledged ioctls is one of your pet-projects so your
insight on what, if anything, needs changing to support them is the
insight I think we need.