[dm-devel] device mapper and the BLKFLSBUF ioctl

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2016, Mike Snitzer wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 21 2016 at  2:33pm -0400,
> Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > I found a bug in dm regarding the BLKFLSBUF ioctl.
> > 
> > The BLKFLSBUF ioctl can be called on a block device and it flushes the 
> > buffer cache. There is one exception - when it is called on ramdisk, it 
> > actually destroys all ramdisk data (it works like a discard on the full 
> > device).
> > 
> > The device mapper passes this ioctl down to the underlying device, so when 
> > the ioctl is called on a logical volume, it can be used to destroy the 
> > underlying volume group if the volume group is on ramdisk.
> > 
> > For example:
> > # modprobe brd rd_size=1048576
> > # pvcreate /dev/ram0
> > # vgcreate ram_vg /dev/ram0
> > # lvcreate -L 16M -n ram_lv ram_vg
> > # blockdev --flushbufs /dev/ram_vg/ram_lv
> > 	--- and now the whole volume group is gone, all data on the 
> > 		ramdisk were replaced with zeroes
> > 
> > The BLKFLSBUF ioctl is only allowed with CAP_SYS_ADMIN, so there shouldn't 
> > be security implications with this.
> > 
> > Whan to do with it? The best thing would be to drop this special ramdisk 
> > behavior and make the BLKFLSBUF ioctl flush the buffer cache on ramdisk 
> > like on all other block devices. But there may be many users having 
> > scripts that depend on this special behavior.
> > 
> > Another possibility is to stop the device mapper from passing the 
> > BLKFLSBUF ioctl down.
> 
> If anything DM is being consistent with what the underlying device is
> meant to do.
> 
> brd_ioctl() destroys the data in response to BLKFLSBUF.. I'm missing why
> this is a DM-specific problem.

The problem is that if we call it on a logical volume, it destroys all 
logical volumes on the give physical volume.

Mikulas