Re: [PATCH] exec: fix up /proc/pid/comm in the execveat(AT_EMPTY_PATH) case

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Sat, 30 Nov 2024 at 04:30, Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> What does the smp_load_acquire() pair with?

I'm not sure we have them everywhere, but at least this one at dentry
creation time.

__d_alloc():
        /* Make sure we always see the terminating NUL character */
        smp_store_release(&dentry->d_name.name, dname); /* ^^^ */

so even at rename time, when we swap the d_name.name pointers
(*without* using a store-release at that time), both of the dentry
names had memory orderings before.

That said, looking at swap_name() at the non-"swap just the pointers"
case, there we do just "memcpy()" the name, and it would probably be
good to update the target d_name.name with a smp_store_release.

In practice, none of this ever matters. Anybody who uses the dentry
name without locking either doesn't care enough (like comm[]) or will
use the sequence number thing to serialize at a much higher level. So
the smp_load_acquire() could probably be a READ_ONCE(), and nobody
would ever see the difference.

            Linus