The following commit has been merged in the linux branch: commit c8e33141911bf8fe87dc6c92793b9a59b2be0130 Author: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Date: Wed Oct 14 08:59:49 2009 -0700

tty: Make flush_to_ldisc() locking more robust

The locking logic in this function is extremely subtle, and it broke when we started doing potentially concurrent 'flush_to_ldisc()' calls in commit e043e42bdb66885b3ac10d27a01ccb9972e2b0a3 ("pty: avoid forcing 'low_latency' tty flag").

The code in flush_to_ldisc() used to set 'tty->buf.head' to NULL, with the intention that this would then cause any other concurrent calls to not do anything (locking note: we have to drop the buf.lock over the call to ->receive_buf that can block, which is why we can have concurrency here at all in the first place).

It also used to set the TTY_FLUSHING bit, which would then cause any concurrent 'tty_buffer_flush()' to not free all the tty buffers and clear 'tty->buf.tail'. And with 'buf.head' being NULL, and 'buf.tail' being non-NULL, new data would never touch 'buf.head'.

Does that sound a bit too subtle? It was. If another concurrent call to 'flush_to_ldisc()' were to come in, the NULL buf.head would indeed cause it to not process the buffer list, but it would still clear TTY_FLUSHING afterwards, making the buffer protection against 'tty_buffer_flush()' no longer work.

So this clears it all up. We depend purely on TTY_FLUSHING for handling re-entrancy, and stop playing games with the buffer list entirely. In fact, the buffer list handling is now robust enough that we could probably stop doing the whole "protect against 'tty_buffer_flush()'" thing entirely.

However, Alan also points out that we would probably be better off simplifying the locking even further, and just take the tty ldisc_mutex around all the buffer flushing calls. That seems like a good idea, but in the meantime this is a conceptually minimal fix (with the patch itself being bigger than required just to clean the code up and make it readable).

This fixes keyboard trouble under X:

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14388

Reported-and-tested-by: Frédéric Meunier fredlwm@gmail.com Reported-and-tested-by: Boyan btanastasov@yahoo.co.uk Cc: Alan Cox alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk Cc: Paul Fulghum paulkf@microgate.com Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org

diff --git a/drivers/char/tty_buffer.c b/drivers/char/tty_buffer.c index 3108991..0296612 100644 --- a/drivers/char/tty_buffer.c +++ b/drivers/char/tty_buffer.c @@ -402,28 +402,26 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work) container_of(work, struct tty_struct, buf.work.work); unsigned long flags; struct tty_ldisc *disc; - struct tty_buffer *tbuf, *head; - char *char_buf; - unsigned char *flag_buf;

disc = tty_ldisc_ref(tty); if (disc == NULL) /* !TTY_LDISC */ return;

spin_lock_irqsave(&tty->buf.lock, flags); - /* So we know a flush is running */ - set_bit(TTY_FLUSHING, &tty->flags); - head = tty->buf.head; - if (head != NULL) { - tty->buf.head = NULL; - for (;;) { - int count = head->commit - head->read; + + if (!test_and_set_bit(TTY_FLUSHING, &tty->flags)) { + struct tty_buffer *head; + while ((head = tty->buf.head) != NULL) { + int count; + char *char_buf; + unsigned char *flag_buf; + + count = head->commit - head->read; if (!count) { if (head->next == NULL) break; - tbuf = head; - head = head->next; - tty_buffer_free(tty, tbuf); + tty->buf.head = head->next; + tty_buffer_free(tty, head); continue; } /* Ldisc or user is trying to flush the buffers @@ -445,9 +443,9 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work) flag_buf, count); spin_lock_irqsave(&tty->buf.lock, flags); } - /* Restore the queue head */ - tty->buf.head = head; + clear_bit(TTY_FLUSHING, &tty->flags); } + /* We may have a deferred request to flush the input buffer, if so pull the chain under the lock and empty the queue */ if (test_bit(TTY_FLUSHPENDING, &tty->flags)) { @@ -455,7 +453,6 @@ static void flush_to_ldisc(struct work_struct *work) clear_bit(TTY_FLUSHPENDING, &tty->flags); wake_up(&tty->read_wait); } - clear_bit(TTY_FLUSHING, &tty->flags); spin_unlock_irqrestore(&tty->buf.lock, flags);

tty_ldisc_deref(disc);