Walking a wait_queue_t list of tasks blocked on pipe

I am trying to write code to walk a wait_queue_t list as part of a LSM file_permission function. The purpose is to act on each task which has blocked while trying to read from a pipe.

I modeled my code on __wake_up_common() in kernel/sched/core.c, and it looks something like this:

	// i_pipe is a struct pipe_inode_info *

	if (i_pipe->reader <= 0) {
		return;
	}

	list_for_each_entry_safe(curr, next, &i_pipe->wait.task, task_list) {
		[...]
		struct task_struct *blocked = curr->private;
		[...]
	}

I am not updating the list itself. I am merely setting a value within each task_struct's security object.

I have tried to wrap my code with this:

	pipe_lock(i_pipe)
	pipe_unlock[...]

this:

	write_lock_irq(&tasklist_lock)
	write_unlock_irq[...]

and also this:

	spin_lock_irqsave(&i_pipe->wait.lock, flags)
	spin_unlock_irqrestore[...]

Despite these locks, I sometimes find that blocked (AKA curr->private) == NULL during an iteration of the list_for_each_entry_safe loop, and this surprises me. Somme memory corruption errors also seem to indicate that sometimes blocked contains an invalid pointer other than NULL. Why would there be en entry in the wait_queue_t list which does not have a process associated with it? Is the data structure moving out from under me? Is there something else I should lock?

Thank you,

--
Mike

:wq

Just don't do that..

What we are trying to do is implement a research prototype for a simple information-flow system using LSM. The idea is that processes become tainted when they read objects marked as confidential and such processes taint other processes based on further interaction.

The problem is that process A could open and block on reading FIFO F before tainted process B writes to F (and causes F to become confidential). Since A's LSM hooks fire off before it blocks, A could end up reading confidential data without itself being tainted.

So it seems that I need to either walk the list of blocked processes, possibly tainting them, or insert a new LSM hook into pipe.c to support rechecking the confidentiality level of the pipe after waking up but before reading.

If this all seems a little crazy it is because we are early in the prototyping process.

Thank you,

Mike

:wq