Rongwei Wang reports [1] that cache validation triggered by writing to
/sys/kernel/slab/<cache>/validate is racy against normal cache
operations (e.g. freeing) in a way that can cause false positive
inconsistency reports for caches with debugging enabled. The problem is
that debugging actions that mark object free or active and actual
freelist operations are not atomic, and the validation can see an
inconsistent state.

For caches that do or don't have debugging enabled, additional races
involving n->nr_slabs are possible that result in false reports of wrong
slab counts.

This patch attempts to solve these issues while not adding overhead to
normal (especially fastpath) operations for caches that do not have
debugging enabled. Such overhead would not be justified to make possible
userspace-triggered validation safe. Instead, disable the validation for
caches that don't have debugging enabled and make their sysfs validate
handler return -EINVAL.

For caches that do have debugging enabled, we can instead extend the
existing approach of not using percpu freelists to force all alloc/free
operations to the slow paths where debugging flags is checked and acted
upon. There can adjust the debug-specific paths to increase n->list_lock
coverage against concurrent validation as necessary.

The processing on free in free_debug_processing() already happens under
n->list_lock so we can extend it to actually do the freeing as well and
thus make it atomic against concurrent validation. As observed by
Hyeonggon Yoo, we do not really need to take slab_lock() anymore here
because all paths we could race with are protected by n->list_lock under
the new scheme, so drop its usage here.

The processing on alloc in alloc_debug_processing() currently doesn't
take any locks, but we have to first allocate the object from a slab on
the partial list (as debugging caches have no percpu slabs) and thus
take the n->list_lock anyway. Add a function alloc_single_from_partial()
that grabs just the allocated object instead of the whole freelist, and
does the debug processing. The n->list_lock coverage again makes it
atomic against validation and it is also ultimately more efficient than
the current grabbing of freelist immediately followed by slab
deactivation.

To prevent races on n->nr_slabs updates, make sure that for caches with
debugging enabled, inc_slabs_node() or dec_slabs_node() is called under
n->list_lock. When allocating a new slab for a debug cache, handle the
allocation by a new function alloc_single_from_new_slab() instead of the
current forced deactivation path.

Neither of these changes affect the fast paths at all. The changes in
slow paths are negligible for non-debug caches.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220529081535.69275-1-rongwei.wang@linux.alibaba.com/Reported-by: NRongwei Wang <rongwei.wang@linux.alibaba.com>
Signed-off-by: NVlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: NHyeonggon Yoo <42.hyeyoo@gmail.com>