Thanks a lot, dann. But it was the [vdso] line in foo's /proc/<pid>/maps
which you sent me privately, that set me thinking on the right track.
Here's what I believe is the appropriate patch: please give it a try
and let us know...
[PATCH] mm: fix ia64 crash when gcore reads gate area
Debian's ia64 autobuilders have been seeing kernel freeze or reboot
when running the gdb testsuite (Debian bug 588574): dannf bisected to
2.6.32 62eede62dafb4a6633eae7ffbeb34c60dba5e7b1 "mm: ZERO_PAGE without
PTE_SPECIAL"; and reproduced it with gdb's gcore on a simple target.
I'd missed updating the gate_vma handling in __get_user_pages(): that
happens to use vm_normal_page() (nowadays failing on the zero page),
yet reported success even when it failed to get a page - boom when
access_process_vm() tried to copy that to its intermediate buffer.
Fix this, resisting cleanups: in particular, leave it for now reporting
success when not asked to get any pages - very probably safe to change,
but let's not risk it without testing exposure.
Why did ia64 crash with 16kB pages, but succeed with 64kB pages?
Because setup_gate() pads each 64kB of its gate area with zero pages.
Reported-by: Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>
Bisected-by: dann frazier <dannf@debian.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
---
mm/memory.c | 16 +++++++++++++---
1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
--- 2.6.35-rc6/mm/memory.c 2010-05-30 17:58:57.000000000 -0700
+++ linux/mm/memory.c 2010-07-29 17:57:29.000000000 -0700
@@ -1394,10 +1394,20 @@ int __get_user_pages(struct task_struct
return i ? : -EFAULT;
}
if (pages) {
- struct page *page = vm_normal_page(gate_vma, start, *pte);
+ struct page *page;
+
+ page = vm_normal_page(gate_vma, start, *pte);
+ if (!page) {
+ if (!(gup_flags & FOLL_DUMP) &&
+ is_zero_pfn(pte_pfn(*pte)))
+ page = pte_page(*pte);
+ else {
+ pte_unmap(pte);
+ return i ? : -EFAULT;
+ }
+ }
pages[i] = page;
- if (page)
- get_page(page);
+ get_page(page);
}
pte_unmap(pte);
if (vmas)
--
