[patch 0/3] Re: tty contention resulting from tty_open_by_device export

[Okash Khawaja]

> On 17 Jul 2017, at 13:31, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 12:29:54PM +0100, Okash Khawaja wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 07:20:28PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
>>> 
>>>> When opening from kernel, we don't use file pointer. The count mismatch
>>>> is between tty->count and #fd's. So opening from kernel leads to #fd's
>>>> being less than tty->count. I thought this difference is relevant to
>>>> user-space opening of tty, and not to kernel opening of tty. Can you
>>>> suggest how to address this mismatch?
>>> 
>>> Your kernel reference is the same as having a file open reference so I
>>> think this actually needs addressing in the maths. In other words count
>>> the number of kernel references and also add that into the test for
>>> check_tty_count (kernel references + #fds == count).
>>> 
>>> I'd really like to keep this right because that check has a long history
>>> of catching really nasty race conditions in the tty code. The
>>> open/close/hangup code is really fragile so worth the debugability.
>> 
>> I see. Okay based this, check_tty_count can be easily updated to take
>> into account kernel references.
> 
> Ok, I'll drop this series from my "to-apply" queue and wait for you to
> redo it.

Sure. I can fix the tty->count mismatch based on Alan's suggestion. However I don't understand why the exclusivity flag should belong to tty_port and not tty_struct. It will be good to know why. 

Thanks,
Okash