tree dc49e81fd98d93e45284f8cc767249008853a3d0
parent e36f803b71126507fcb6d5d69d507ceebea652c0
author Aurelien DARRAGON <adarragon@haproxy.com> 1679403736 +0100
committer Christopher Faulet <cfaulet@haproxy.com> 1680677897 +0200

BUG/MEDIUM: hlua: prevent deadlocks with main lua lock

Main lua lock is used at various places in the code.

Most of the time it is used from unprotected lua environments,
in which case the locking is mandatory.
But there are some cases where the lock is attempted from protected
lua environments, meaning that lock is already owned by the current
thread. Thus new locking attempt should be skipped to prevent any
deadlocks from occuring.

To address this, "already_safe" lock hint was implemented in
hlua_ctx_init() function with commit bf90ce1
("BUG/MEDIUM: lua: dead lock when Lua tasks are trigerred")

But this approach is not very safe, for 2 reasons:

First reason is that there are still some code paths that could lead
to deadlocks.
For instance, in register_task(), hlua_ctx_init() is called with
already_safe set to 1 to prevent deadlock from occuring.

But in case of task init failure, hlua_ctx_destroy() will be called
from the same environment (protected environment), and hlua_ctx_destroy()
does not offer the already_safe lock hint.. resulting in a deadlock.

Second reason is that already_safe hint is used to completely skip
SET_LJMP macros (which manipulates the lock internally), resulting
in some logics in the function being unprotected from lua aborts in
case of unexpected errors when manipulating the lua stack (the lock
does not protect against longjmps)

Instead of leaving the locking responsibility to the caller, which is
quite error prone since we must find out ourselves if we are or not in
a protected environment (and is not robust against code re-use),
we move the deadlock protection logic directly in hlua_lock() function.

Thanks to a thread-local lock hint, we can easily guess if the current
thread already owns the main lua lock, in which case the locking attempt
is skipped. The thread-local lock hint is implemented as a counter so
that the lock is properly dropped when the counter reaches 0.
(to match actual lock() and unlock() calls)

This commit depends on "MINOR: hlua: simplify lua locking"
It may be backported to every stable versions.
[prior to 2.5 lua filter API did not exist, filter-related parts
should be skipped]