[PATCH] Android / binder: Fix broken walk in binder_node_release()

Compostella, Jeremy jeremy.compostella at intel.com
Thu Feb 20 10:05:37 UTC 2014


Hi,

I've found a bug in the binder driver and I propose the attached patch to fix
it.  This bug could manifest itself in several situations, here is the one that
made me hunt it last week.

When an Android device is encrypted, Android starts all the init services of
core and main levels, then it asks for the password and checks it trying to
mount /data.  On success, it kills all the main services, mount /data and
restart all the main services.

Unfortunately, on restart of those main services we observe :

DisplayManager       Could not get display information from display manager.
DisplayManager       android.os.DeadObjectException
DisplayManager       at android.os.BinderProxy.transact(Native Method)
DisplayManager       at android.hardware.display.IDisplayManager$Stub$Proxy.getDisplayInfo(IDisplayManager.java:228)
DisplayManager       at android.hardware.display.DisplayManagerGlobal.getDisplayInfo(DisplayManagerGlobal.java:117)
DisplayManager       at android.hardware.display.DisplayManagerGlobal.getCompatibleDisplay(DisplayManagerGlobal.java:176)
DisplayManager       at android.app.ResourcesManager.getDisplayMetricsLocked(ResourcesManager.java:96)
DisplayManager       at android.app.ResourcesManager.getDisplayMetricsLocked(ResourcesManager.java:74)
[...]

Which means that the 'display' service is registered into the service_manager
but point to a dead object (understand died process).  This error is the first
one of a chain of missing "remote" objects causing the death of processes until
the system can recovery by itself a few seconds later.

The binder driver allows a "process" to ask a notification when a particular
reference die.  In that case, the binder driver associate a death object to this
reference.

When the system_server process died, the file descriptor to the binder driver is
automatically released and the binder driver will walk all the references
associated to this process to unallocate them.  When such a reference has a
death object associated it will execute a task to notify the death to the
previously register process usually the service_manager process.

The bug is that this walk on all the references is broken due to an
unfornate refactoring made by the following patch :

        commit 008fa749e0fe5b2fffd20b7fe4891bb80d072c6a
        Author: Mirsal Ennaime <mirsal at mirsal.fr>
        Date:   Tue Mar 12 11:41:59 2013 +0100

which break the loop if the current reference does not have a death object
instead of continuing to the next reference.  As a consequence all the next
references will not be correctly unallocate and no death notification will be
sent for them.

Thanks,

Jérémy
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