Revert "fs: don't block i_writecount during exec"

This reverts commit 2a010c41285345da60cece35575b4e0af7e7bf44.

Rui Ueyama <rui314@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm the creator and the maintainer of the mold linker
> (https://github.com/rui314/mold). Recently, we discovered that mold
> started causing process crashes in certain situations due to a change
> in the Linux kernel. Here are the details:
>
> - In general, overwriting an existing file is much faster than
> creating an empty file and writing to it on Linux, so mold attempts to
> reuse an existing executable file if it exists.
>
> - If a program is running, opening the executable file for writing
> previously failed with ETXTBSY. If that happens, mold falls back to
> creating a new file.
>
> - However, the Linux kernel recently changed the behavior so that
> writing to an executable file is now always permitted
> (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=2a010c412853).
>
> That caused mold to write to an executable file even if there's a
> process running that file. Since changes to mmap'ed files are
> immediately visible to other processes, any processes running that
> file would almost certainly crash in a very mysterious way.
> Identifying the cause of these random crashes took us a few days.
>
> Rejecting writes to an executable file that is currently running is a
> well-known behavior, and Linux had operated that way for a very long
> time. So, I don’t believe relying on this behavior was our mistake;
> rather, I see this as a regression in the Linux kernel.

Quoting myself from commit 2a010c412853 ("fs: don't block i_writecount during exec")

> Yes, someone in userspace could potentially be relying on this. It's not
> completely out of the realm of possibility but let's find out if that's
> actually the case and not guess.

It seems we found out that someone is relying on this obscure behavior.
So revert the change.

Link: https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1361
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/4a2bc207-76be-4715-8e12-7fc45a76a125@leemhuis.info
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 23 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c
index f253e81d0c28..1450b461d196 100644
--- a/kernel/fork.c
+++ b/kernel/fork.c
@@ -621,6 +621,12 @@ static void dup_mm_exe_file(struct mm_struct *mm, struct mm_struct *oldmm)
 
 	exe_file = get_mm_exe_file(oldmm);
 	RCU_INIT_POINTER(mm->exe_file, exe_file);
+	/*
+	 * We depend on the oldmm having properly denied write access to the
+	 * exe_file already.
+	 */
+	if (exe_file && deny_write_access(exe_file))
+		pr_warn_once("deny_write_access() failed in %s\n", __func__);
 }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_MMU
@@ -1413,11 +1419,20 @@ int set_mm_exe_file(struct mm_struct *mm, struct file *new_exe_file)
 	 */
 	old_exe_file = rcu_dereference_raw(mm->exe_file);
 
-	if (new_exe_file)
+	if (new_exe_file) {
+		/*
+		 * We expect the caller (i.e., sys_execve) to already denied
+		 * write access, so this is unlikely to fail.
+		 */
+		if (unlikely(deny_write_access(new_exe_file)))
+			return -EACCES;
 		get_file(new_exe_file);
+	}
 	rcu_assign_pointer(mm->exe_file, new_exe_file);
-	if (old_exe_file)
+	if (old_exe_file) {
+		allow_write_access(old_exe_file);
 		fput(old_exe_file);
+	}
 	return 0;
 }
 
@@ -1456,6 +1471,9 @@ int replace_mm_exe_file(struct mm_struct *mm, struct file *new_exe_file)
 			return ret;
 	}
 
+	ret = deny_write_access(new_exe_file);
+	if (ret)
+		return -EACCES;
 	get_file(new_exe_file);
 
 	/* set the new file */
@@ -1464,8 +1482,10 @@ int replace_mm_exe_file(struct mm_struct *mm, struct file *new_exe_file)
 	rcu_assign_pointer(mm->exe_file, new_exe_file);
 	mmap_write_unlock(mm);
 
-	if (old_exe_file)
+	if (old_exe_file) {
+		allow_write_access(old_exe_file);
 		fput(old_exe_file);
+	}
 	return 0;
 }