On Fri, 12 Jan 2024, John Ogness wrote:
On 2024-01-12, Gui-Dong Han 2045gemini@gmail.com wrote:
In uart_tiocmget(): result = uport->mctrl; uart_port_lock_irq(uport); result |= uport->ops->get_mctrl(uport); uart_port_unlock_irq(uport); ... return result;
In uart_update_mctrl(): uart_port_lock_irqsave(port, &flags); ... port->mctrl = (old & ~clear) | set; ... uart_port_unlock_irqrestore(port, flags);
An atomicity violation is identified due to the concurrent execution of uart_tiocmget() and uart_update_mctrl(). After assigning result = uport->mctrl, the mctrl value may change in uart_update_mctrl(), leading to a mismatch between the value returned by uport->ops->get_mctrl(uport) and the mctrl value previously read. This can result in uart_tiocmget() returning an incorrect value.
This possible bug is found by an experimental static analysis tool developed by our team, BassCheck[1]. This tool analyzes the locking APIs to extract function pairs that can be concurrently executed, and then analyzes the instructions in the paired functions to identify possible concurrency bugs including data races and atomicity violations. The above possible bug is reported when our tool analyzes the source code of Linux 5.17.
To address this issue, it is suggested to move the line result = uport->mctrl inside the uart_port_lock block to ensure atomicity and prevent the mctrl value from being altered during the execution of uart_tiocmget(). With this patch applied, our tool no longer reports the bug, with the kernel configuration allyesconfig for x86_64. Due to the absence of the requisite hardware, we are unable to conduct runtime testing of the patch. Therefore, our verification is solely based on code logic analysis.
[1] https://sites.google.com/view/basscheck/
Fixes: 559c7ff4e324 ("serial: core: Use port lock wrappers")
It fixes c5f4644e6c8b ("[PATCH] Serial: Adjust serial locking").
That commit only extracted the locks from ->get_mctrl() into the caller but this assignment was outside both pre and post that commit (the issue goes all the way back into history.git domain into 33c0d1b0c3eb ("[PATCH] Serial driver stuff") which introduced ->mctrl).