While using emacs, cat or others' commands in konsole with recent
kernels, I have met many times that CTRL-C freeze konsole. After
konsole freeze I can't type anything, then I have to open a new one,
it is very annoying.
See bug report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=175283
The platform in that bug report is Solaris, but now the pty in linux
has the same problem or the same behavior as Solaris :)
It has high possibility to trigger the problem follow steps below:
Note: In my test, BigFile is a text file whose size is bigger than 1G
1:open konsole
1:cat BigFile
2:CTRL-C
After some digging, I find out the reason is that commit
1d1d14da12e7
("pty: Fix buffer flush deadlock") changes the behavior of pty_flush_buffer.
Thread A Thread B
-------- --------
1:n_tty_poll return POLLIN
2:CTRL-C trigger pty_flush_buffer
tty_buffer_flush
n_tty_flush_buffer
3:attempt to check count of chars:
ioctl(fd, TIOCINQ, &available)
available is equal to 0
4:read(fd, buffer, avaiable)
return 0
5:konsole close fd
Yes, I know we could use the same patch included in the BUG report as
a workaround for linux platform too. But I think the data in ldisc is
belong to application of another side, we shouldn't clear it when we
want to flush write buffer of this side in pty_flush_buffer. So I think
it is better to disable ldisc flush in pty_flush_buffer, because its new
hehavior bring no benefit except that it mess up the behavior between
POLLIN, and TIOCINQ or FIONREAD.
Also I find no flush_buffer function in others' tty driver has the
same behavior as current pty_flush_buffer.
Fixes:
1d1d14da12e7 ("pty: Fix buffer flush deadlock")
CC: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.0+
Signed-off-by: Wang YanQing <udknight@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>