Please ignore this patch, I'll submit an updated one. I somehow managed to only execute a subset of the fast-tests suite initially and didn't run eal_flags_misc_autotest at all. Now I see that my proposed fix is flawed, I will submit another try soon.

Sorry for the noise

On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 11:57 AM Ashish Sadanandan <ashish.sadanandan@gmail.com> wrote:
The code added for allowing --huge-dir to specify hugetlbfs
sub-directories has a bug where it incorrectly matches mounts that
contain a prefix of the specified --huge-dir.

Consider --huge-dir=/dev/hugepages1G is passed to rte_eal_init. Given
the following hugetlbfs mounts

$ mount | grep hugetlbfs
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages1G type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=1024M)
hugetlbfs on /mnt/huge type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)

get_hugepage_dir is first called with hugepage_sz=2097152. While
iterating over all mount points, /dev/hugepages is incorrectly
determined to be a match because it's a prefix of --huge-dir. The caller
then obtains an exclusive lock on --huge-dir.

In the next call to get_hugepage_dir, hugepage_sz=1073741824. This call
correctly determines /dev/hugepages1G is a match. The caller again
attempts to obtain an exclusive lock on --huge-dir and deadlocks because
it's already holding a lock.

This has been corrected by rejecting the mount point being considered if
its length is smaller than the specified --huge-dir.

Fixes: 24d5a1ce6b85 ("eal/linux: allow hugetlbfs sub-directories")
Cc: john.levon@nutanix.com
Cc: stable@dpdk.org
---
 lib/eal/linux/eal_hugepage_info.c | 11 +++++++----
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/eal/linux/eal_hugepage_info.c b/lib/eal/linux/eal_hugepage_info.c
index a1b6cb31ff..fcc3d82fdf 100644
--- a/lib/eal/linux/eal_hugepage_info.c
+++ b/lib/eal/linux/eal_hugepage_info.c
@@ -269,16 +269,19 @@ get_hugepage_dir(uint64_t hugepage_sz, char *hugedir, int len)
                 * Ignore any mount that doesn't contain the --huge-dir
                 * directory.
                 */
-               if (strncmp(internal_conf->hugepage_dir, splitstr[MOUNTPT],
-                       strlen(splitstr[MOUNTPT])) != 0) {
+               size_t mountpt_len = strlen(splitstr[MOUNTPT]);
+
+               if (strlen(internal_conf->hugepage_dir) > mountpt_len)
+                       continue;
+               else if (strncmp(internal_conf->hugepage_dir, splitstr[MOUNTPT],
+                       mountpt_len) != 0)
                        continue;
-               }

                /*
                 * We found a match, but only prefer it if it's a longer match
                 * (so /mnt/1 is preferred over /mnt for matching /mnt/1/2)).
                 */
-               if (strlen(splitstr[MOUNTPT]) > strlen(found))
+               if (mountpt_len > strlen(found))
                        strlcpy(found, splitstr[MOUNTPT], len);
        } /* end while fgets */

--
2.27.0