bus-message: introduce two kinds of references to bus messages
Before this commit bus messages had a single reference count: when it
reached zero the message would be freed. This simple approach meant a
cyclic dependency was typically seen: a message that was enqueued in a
bus connection object would reference the bus connection object but also
itself be referenced by the bus connection object. So far out strategy
to avoid cases like this was: make sure to process the bus connection
regularly so that messages don#t stay queued, and at exit flush/close
the connection so that the message queued would be emptied, and thus the
cyclic dependencies resolved. Im many cases this isn't done properly
however.
With this change, let's address the issue more systematically: let's
break the reference cycle. Specifically, there are now two types of
references to a bus message:
1. A regular one, which keeps both the message and the bus object it is
associated with pinned.
2. A "queue" reference, which is weaker: it pins the message, but not
the bus object it is associated with.
The idea is then that regular user handling uses regular references, but
when a message is enqueued on its connection, then this takes a "queue"
reference instead. This then means that a queued message doesn't imply
the connection itself remains pinned, only regular references to the
connection or a message associated with it do. Thus, if we end up in the
situation where a user allocates a bus and a message and enqueues the
latter in the former and drops all refs to both, then this will detect
this case and free both.
Note that this scheme isn't perfect, it only covers references between
messages and the busses they are associated with. If OTOH a bus message
is enqueued on a different bus than it is associated with cyclic deps
cannot be recognized with this simple algorithm, and thus if you enqueue
a message associated with a bus A on a bus B, and another message
associated with bus B on a bus A, a cyclic ref will be in effect and not
be discovered. However, given that this is an exotic case (though one
that happens, consider systemd-bus-stdio-bridge), it should be OK not to
cover with this, and people have to explicit flush all queues on exit in
that case.
Note that this commit only establishes the separate reference counters
per message. A follow-up commit will start making use of this from the
bus connection object.
(cherry picked from commit 1b3f9dd759ca0ea215e7b89f8ce66d1b724497b9)
Related: CVE-2020-1712
patch_name: 0313-bus-message-introduce-two-kinds-of-references-to-bus.patch
present_in_specfile: true
location_in_specfile: 313
squash_commits: true