[RFC 0/2] Reenable might_sleep() checks for might_fault() when atomic

Michael S. Tsirkin mst at redhat.com
Thu Nov 27 02:23:34 AEDT 2014


On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 05:17:29PM +0200, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 11:05:04AM +0100, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> > > What's the path you are trying to debug?
> > 
> > Well, we had a problem where we held a spin_lock and called
> > copy_(from|to)_user(). We experienced very random deadlocks that took some guy
> > almost a week to debug. The simple might_sleep() check would have showed this
> > error immediately.
> 
> This must have been a very old kernel.
> A modern kernel will return an error from copy_to_user.
> Which is really the point of the patch you are trying to revert.

That's assuming you disabled preemption. If you didn't, and take
a spinlock, you have deadlocks even without userspace access.

-- 
MST


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