[Devel] Re: [PATCH][usercr]: Ghost tasks must be detached

[Sukadev Bhattiprolu]

Oren Laadan [orenl at cs.columbia.edu] wrote:
| 
| 
| On 02/05/2011 04:40 PM, Sukadev Bhattiprolu wrote:
| > Oren Laadan [orenl at cs.columbia.edu] wrote:
| > | Suka,
| > | 
| > | This patch - and the corresponding kernel patch - are wrong
| > 
| > Ah, I see that now.
| > 
| > But am not sure about the kernel part though. We were getting a crash
| > reliably (with older kernels) because of the ->exit_signal = -1 in
| > do_ghost_task().
| 
| Are we still getting it with 2.6.37 ?

I am not currently getting the crash on 2.6.37 - I thought it was due to
the following commit which removed the check for task_detached() in
do_wait_thread().

	commit 9cd80bbb07fcd6d4d037fad4297496d3b132ac6b
	Author: Oleg Nesterov <oleg at redhat.com>
	Date:   Thu Dec 17 15:27:15 2009 -0800

But if that is true, I need to investigate why Louis Rilling was getting
the crash in Jun 2010 - which he tried to fix here:

	http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/6/16/295

Even if we are not currently not getting the crash, I think user-space
actions can result in the container-init being unable to forcibly kill
all its children and exit.

Eg: if ghost tasks are pushed into a child pid namespace (by intentionally
setting ->piddepth in usercr/restart.c), we can have a situation where the
ghost task exits silently, the parent (i.e container-init can be left hanging).

It can be argued that the incorrect changes in usercr code result in the
application hang.

But pid namespace is supposed to guarantee that if a container-init is
terminated, it will take the pid namespace down. But some userspace 
actions can result in kill -9 of container-init leaving the container-init
hung forever.

| > 
| > One fix I was watching for was Eric Biederman's 
| > 
| > 	http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/12/213
| > 
| > which AFAICT has not been merged yet.
| 
| If we need it and it isn't in mainline (any reason why ?) then
| we can just add it to our linux-cr tree, as a preparatory patch.
| 
| > 
| > Was there another change to 2.6.37 that would prevent the crash ?
| 
| I don't know whether *that* crash still happens in 2.6.37 - 
| because I still didn't test it with that kernel line back.
| (Actually, I never experienced that crash here even with
| earlier kernels).

Yes, it needed some "accidental" usercr change to expose the crash :-)

(I will try to send a patch to existing usercr and a test case to repro
this problem)

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