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

[Oren Laadan]

On 02/09/2011 09:44 PM, Sukadev Bhattiprolu wrote:
> Oren Laadan [orenl at cs.columbia.edu] wrote:
> | 
> | 
> | > 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
> | 
> | I see. So basically there is a kerenl bug that can be potentially
> | exposed by the c/r code. Therefore, we need to fix the kernel bug...
> | (and until such a fix makes it to mainline, we'll add it as part of
> | the linux-cr patchset).
> 
> Yes, but there is more than one problem (at least in our C/R kernel).
> 
> There is the bug that Louis Rilling reported and Eric has a fix for.
> Even if we apply Eric's fix to the C/R kernel, we still will have
> another problem if do_ghost_task() sets ->exit_signal to -1.
> 
> Consider this in 2.6.37:
> 
> Container-init:					Ghost child of container-init
> 
> 							do_ghost_task()
> zap_pid_ns..()
>   Send SIGKILL
> 
>   do_wait()
>     - adds self to ->wait_chldexit queue
>     - goes through do_wait_thread() - finds that
>       it has at least one child  (on tsk->children),
>       but it has not yet exited
>     - so waits for the child to exit
>   							wakes up for SIGKILL
> 							->exit_signal = -1
> 							do_exit()
> 
> Note that exit_notify() does not notify parent when the ghost process
> exits, because ->exit_signal is -1.

I see.. nice catch :)

To address this, initially I thought that we could make ghosts take
the tasklist_lock (write) when they change their ->exit_signal. 

But that's not enough because the parent may already be blocked in
wait (so it's too late). Therefore, we also need to have ghosts 
wake-up their parent through __wake_up_parent().

so something like:

void ghost_auto_reapable()
{
	write_lock(&tasklist_lock);
	current->exit_signal = -1;
	__wake_up_sync_key(current, current->parent);
	write_unlock(&tasklist_lock);
}

If the parent wasn't at all waiting for us, no harm done...

> 
> So you may ask how did the container-init have a ghost child. That was
> due to a bug in usercr :-). 

You don't need a bug: the ghost flag is used for both ghost and dead
tasks (the former used to instantiate specific pids, the latter to
make other tasks orphans). So restarting a container that had orphan
tasks is guaranteed to do this.

Oren.

> 
> But my point is such a userspace bug can leave the above container init
> unkillable.
> 
> Note that this does not happen with normal threads which set ->exit_signal
> to -1 . That is because of the following two pieces of code in copy_process():
> 
>        /* ok, now we should be set up.. */
>         p->exit_signal = (clone_flags & CLONE_THREAD) ? -1 : (clone_flags & CSIGNAL);
> 
> and 
> 
>         /* CLONE_PARENT re-uses the old parent */
>         if (clone_flags & (CLONE_PARENT|CLONE_THREAD)) {
>                 p->real_parent = current->real_parent;
>                 p->parent_exec_id = current->parent_exec_id;
> 
> With this our container-init above will not have any children to wait
> for in do_wait_thread().
> 
> Sukadev
> 
_______________________________________________
Containers mailing list
Containers at lists.linux-foundation.org
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/containers