coredump: only SIGKILL should interrupt the coredumping task
authorOleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:28:10 +0000 (15:28 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Wed, 1 May 2013 00:04:06 +0000 (17:04 -0700)
commit403bad72b67d8b3f5a0240af5023adfa48132a65
treed240a287cf7e64824dc6441f397b0290aa79738b
parent66e5b7e1948cdbdca2b0cc6ddc6d69ee84583fb4
coredump: only SIGKILL should interrupt the coredumping task

There are 2 well known and ancient problems with coredump/signals, and a
lot of related bug reports:

- do_coredump() clears TIF_SIGPENDING but of course this can't help
  if, say, SIGCHLD comes after that.

  In this case the coredump can fail unexpectedly. See for example
  wait_for_dump_helper()->signal_pending() check but there are other
  reasons.

- At the same time, dumping a huge core on the slow media can take a
  lot of time/resources and there is no way to kill the coredumping
  task reliably. In particular this is not oom_kill-friendly.

This patch tries to fix the 1st problem, and makes the preparation for the
next changes.

We add the new SIGNAL_GROUP_COREDUMP flag set by zap_threads() to indicate
that this process dumps the core.  prepare_signal() checks this flag and
nacks any signal except SIGKILL.

Note that this check tries to be conservative, in the long term we should
probably treat the SIGNAL_GROUP_EXIT case equally but this needs more
discussion.  See marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=120508897917439

Notes:
- recalc_sigpending() doesn't check SIGNAL_GROUP_COREDUMP.
  The patch assumes that dump_write/etc paths should never
  call it, but we can change it as well.

- There is another source of TIF_SIGPENDING, freezer. This
  will be addressed separately.

Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Mandeep Singh Baines <msb@chromium.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Neil Horman <nhorman@redhat.com>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Roland McGrath <roland@hack.frob.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
fs/coredump.c
include/linux/sched.h
kernel/signal.c