Re: [RFC][PATCH] cgroup: fix race between fork and cgroup freezing

[Frederic Weisbecker]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 04:45:13PM +0800, Li Zefan wrote:
> A similar bug exists in cpuset, and those are long-standing bugs.
> 
> As reported by Frederic:
> 
> > When a user freezes a cgroup, the freezer sets the subsystem state
> > to CGROUP_FREEZING and then iterates over the tasks in the cgroup links.
> > 
> > But there is a possible race here, although unlikely, if a task
> > forks and the parent is preempted between write_unlock(tasklist_lock)
> > and cgroup_post_fork(). If we freeze the cgroup while the parent
> > is sleeping and the parent wakes up thereafter, its child will
> > be missing from the set of tasks to freeze because:
> > 
> > - The child was not yet linked to its css_set->tasks, as is done
> > from cgroup_post_fork(). cgroup_iter_start() has thus missed it.
> > 
> > - The cgroup freezer's fork callback can handle that child but
> > cgroup_fork_callbacks() has been called already.
> 
> I try to fix it by using seqcount. We read the counter before calling
> cgroup_fork_callbacks(), and we check the counter after cgroup_post_fork().
> If the seq numbers don't match, we know the forking task's cgroup
> has been/is being frozen, so we freeze the child task.
> 
> cpuset can be fixed accordingly.
> 
> Reported-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@xxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Li Zefan <lizf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I feel we are a bit stuck here. All these complications come from the
fact we are conditionally setting this css_set link.

I wish we could set it unconditionally on cgroup_fork() time.
This unfortunately implies at least locking the css_set and to do
a list_add() unconditionally. And at times where cgroup is often
critisized for the overhead it involves, I guess this is not welcome.

This ->post_fork() based solution is not pretty, unfortunately I can't
come with a better idea.
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