it seems that on linux at least, if the device is left open, no other
process can open it? this achieves the same effect, without any code
at all.
allan
On 2/24/08, Julien BLACHE <jb at jblache.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The snapscan backend uses a mutex to lock the USB device it's working
> with when sending "atomic" commands.
>
> We're not talking about pthread mutexes here, which is one of the
> available implementations, but IPC semaphores.
>
> Let's look at the code:
>
> static int snapscani_mutex_open(snapscan_mutex_t* sem_id, const char* dev)
> {
> *sem_id = semget( ftok(dev,0x12), 1, IPC_CREAT | 0660 );
> if (*sem_id != -1)
> {
> semop(*sem_id, &sem_signal, 1);
> return 1;
> }
> return 0;
> }
>
> ftok() requires its first argument to be a real, accessible
> file. Obviously, when the code was written, USB scanners were driven
> through the kernel scanner driver and this was not a problem.
>
> But today, dev is something like "libusb:001:003" which is all but a
> real, accessible file.
>
> ftok() returns -1 in this case, but this isn't checked for in this
> code, so it happily goes on and semget(0xffffffff, 1, ...).
>
> As it happens, most of the time, that works. Except when another
> similarly careless piece of code has already used 0xffffffff as the
> IPC key.
>
> In which case, all hell breaks loose.
>
> So, 2 bugs in this code:
> - ftok() return value is not checked (BAD BAD BAD)
> - dev is not a real file
>
> Now, two questions:
> - is that locking really useful in the backend?
> - if yes, how do we fix this?
>
> I've started patching sanei_usb to add a method to return the full
> path to the USB device node, except libusb doesn't expose this
> information. Second-guessing is obviously not an option :|
>
> And there is the UsbCalls access method that needs to be fixed if it
> can be used along with IPC semaphores and I don't know anything about
> UsbCalls...
>
> Thoughts ?
>
> JB.
>
> --
> Julien BLACHE <http://www.jblache.org>
> <jb at jblache.org> GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169
>
>
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