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Re: sleeping, locks and debug kernels


On 12/12, David Smith wrote:
>
> On 12/12/2011 09:21 AM, Mark Wielaard wrote:
>
> > There is one issue I don't know how to solve. That is
> > stap_start_task_finder() this takes a rcu_read_lock() goes over every
> > task, inspects each, calls utrace_attach on it if appropriate, gets the
> > task->mm, adds the engines to some internal datastructures, checks that
> > unprivileged users don't get access to utrace engines of task that
> > aren't theirs and then after doing that for each task releases the lock.
> > The problem is that utrace_attach_task() may sleep, since it must
> > allocate memory to create a new enginer. Which is not nice while we have
> > the rcu_read_lock. But I don't immediately see how to split up this loop
> > so that we only hold the lock while doing non-sleepy things.

Yes, this is the problem. Although I am not sure how "goes over every
task" can work under rcu_read_lock() without races with clone(). For
example, even "attach all threads in this thread group" is not simple.
But this is off-topic.

> I don't know how we could split up that loop.  Perhaps Oleg might have
> some thoughts or might be persuaded to change the memory allocation
> flags in utrace itself.

Yes, it is very simple to add UTRACE_ATTACH_CREATE_ATOMIC.

Oleg.


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