Re: [PATCH v3] ucounts: add missing data type changes

[Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org>]

Hi Eric,

On 8/4/2021 12:47 PM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Nathan Chancellor <nathan@kernel.org> writes:
> 
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 08:28:54AM +0200, Sven Schnelle wrote:
>>> commit f9c82a4ea89c3 ("Increase size of ucounts to atomic_long_t")
>>> changed the data type of ucounts/ucounts_max to long, but missed to
>>> adjust a few other places. This is noticeable on big endian platforms
>>> from user space because the /proc/sys/user/max_*_names files all
>>> contain 0.
>>>
>>> Fixes: f9c82a4ea89c ("Increase size of ucounts to atomic_long_t")
>>> Signed-off-by: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com>
>>
>> This patch in -next as commit e43fc41d1f7f ("ucounts: add missing data type
>> changes") causes Windows Subsystem for Linux to fail to start:
>>
>> [error 0x8007010b when launching `wsl.exe -d Arch'] Could not access starting
>> directory "\\wsl$\Arch\home\nathan"
>>
>> Specifically, it is the change to max_user_watches in
>> fs/notify/inotify/inotify_user.c, as the below diff gets me back to working.
>> Unfortunately, I have no additional information to offer beyond that as WSL's
>> init is custom and closed source (as far as I am aware) and there are no real
>> debugging utilities.
> 
> Could you try this patch and tell us what value is being set?
> 
> The only think I can imagine is that someone wants unlimited watches and
> sets the value to a ridiculously large value and the interpretation of
> that value winds up being different between int and long.
> 
> This should allow you to read either dmesg or the kernel's log as it
> boots up and see what value is being written.  From there it should
> be relatively straight forward to figure out what is going on.

I applied this diff on top of mine and running 'dmesg |& grep intvec' shows:

[    0.282500] intvec: dmesg_restrict <- 0
[    0.282510] intvec: max_user_watches <- 524288

This seems much smaller than INT_MAX so I am not sure how the value 
could be different between int and long but I am not at all familiar 
with the sysctl code.

More than happy to continue to test debug patches or provide any 
additional information as I can.

Cheers,
Nathan

> diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
> index 272f4a272f8c..733c4cfa1f60 100644
> --- a/kernel/sysctl.c
> +++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
> @@ -975,6 +975,14 @@ int proc_dointvec_minmax(struct ctl_table *table, int write,
>   		.min = (int *) table->extra1,
>   		.max = (int *) table->extra2,
>   	};
> +#if 1
> +	size_t lenv = *lenp;
> +	if (write && (lenv > 0) && (lenv < INT_MAX)) {
> +		int len = lenv;
> +		printk(KERN_EMERG "intvec: %s <- %*.*s\n",
> +			table->procname, len, len, (char *)buffer);
> +	}
> +#endif
>   	return do_proc_dointvec(table, write, buffer, lenp, ppos,
>   				do_proc_dointvec_minmax_conv, &param);
>   }
>