Subject: Re: [PATCH net] ipv4: Fix use-after-free when flushing FIB tables

From: Ido Schimmel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2017 20:49:13 +0200

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 09:34:16AM -0800, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> That seems like unneeded complexity when the issue is just the order
> that these were created in versus the order they are freed in. As long
> as we always destroy the one containing the alias before the one that
> has the actual data we don't need to have a reference count. Basically
> the issue is the bring-up and the tear-down order. It isn't something
> that really needs a reference count since it would always be either 1
> or 2. My preference would be to just add a comment explaining that
> local must always be destroyed before the main trie in order to
> guarantee that there are no external references to the data contained
> in main when it is freed.
> 
> The one question I have in all this is if I did the bring-up in the
> right order in the first place. I'm wondering if local should be where
> the combined trie lives instead of main. Local is currently destroyed
> after main anyway so I wonder if it wouldn't have been better if
> everything lived in local since from what I can tell it looks like we
> add rules for local first before we do so in main. The complexity of
> that patch would be higher though since the patch would need to be
> much larger and touch multiple files.

I decided to go with the original patch because it resulted in a very
small diff (patch is needed in -stable as well), but I agree with Dave
about it not being explicit enough.

How about I'll send v2 with a comment and then we can try Alex's
suggestion in net-next?

Thanks