It is possible for an associative array to end up with a shortcut node at the
root of the tree if there are more than fan-out leaves in the tree, but they
all crowd into the same slot in the lowest level (ie. they all have the same
first nibble of their index keys).
When assoc_array_gc() returns back up the tree after scanning some leaves, it
can fall off of the root and crash because it assumes that the back pointer
from a shortcut (after label ascend_old_tree) must point to a normal node -
which isn't true of a shortcut node at the root.
Should we find we're ascending rootwards over a shortcut, we should check to
see if the backpointer is zero - and if it is, we have completed the scan.
This particular bug cannot occur if the root node is not a shortcut - ie. if
you have fewer than 17 keys in a keyring or if you have at least two keys that
sit into separate slots (eg. a keyring and a non keyring).
This can be reproduced by:
ring=`keyctl newring bar @s`
for ((i=1; i<=18; i++)); do last_key=`keyctl newring foo$i $ring`; done
keyctl timeout $last_key 2
Doing this:
echo 3 >/proc/sys/kernel/keys/gc_delay
first will speed things up.
If we do fall off of the top of the tree, we get the following oops: