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

Michael S. Tsirkin mst at redhat.com
Thu Nov 27 04:04:47 AEDT 2014


On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 05:51:08PM +0100, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
> > But this one was > giving users in field false positives.
> 
> So lets try to fix those, ok? If we cant, then tough luck.

Sure.
I think the simplest way might be to make spinlock disable
premption when CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP is enabled.

As a result, userspace access will fail and caller will
get a nice error.



> But coming up with wrong statements is not helpful.

True. Sorry that I did that.

> > 
> > The point is that *_user is safe with preempt off.
> > It returns an error gracefully.
> > It does not sleep.
> > It does not trigger the scheduler in that context.
> 
> There are special cases where your statement is true. But its not in general.
> copy_to_user might fault and that fault might sleep and reschedule.

Yes. But not if called inatomic.



> For example handle_mm_fault might go down to pud_alloc, pmd_alloc etc and all these functions could do an GFP_KERNEL allocation. Which might sleep. Which will schedule.
> 
> 
> > 
> > 
> > David's patch makes it say it does, so it's wrong.
> > 
> > 
> > 

Absolutely.
I think you can already debug your case easily, by enabling CONFIG_PREEMPT.
This seems counter-intuitive, and distro debug kernels don't seem to do this.

-- 
MST


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