KVM overflows the stack

Dave Hansen
2008-07-16T22:48:50Z

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 14:44 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On a suggestion of Anthony's, I tried a defconfig kernel.
>
> It is now bombing out on an assertion in the lapic code:
>
> http://sr71.net/~dave/linux/2.6.26-oops1.txt

I think I found it!!!

$ (objdump -d kvm.ko ; objdump -d kvm-intel.ko ) | egrep 'sub.*0x...,.*esp|>:' | egrep sub -B1
00001a90 <kvm_vcpu_ioctl>:
1a9a: 81 ec 60 06 00 00 sub $0x660,%esp
--
00004e90 <kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl>:
4e9d: 81 ec 6c 08 00 00 sub $0x86c,%esp
--
00005900 <kvm_arch_vm_ioctl>:
5903: 81 ec 34 05 00 00 sub $0x534,%esp
--
0000d4f0 <paging64_prefetch_page>:
d4f8: 81 ec 1c 01 00 00 sub $0x11c,%esp
--
0000dfd0 <paging32_prefetch_page>:
dfd8: 81 ec 1c 01 00 00 sub $0x11c,%esp
--
0000f390 <kvm_pv_mmu_op>:
f3a1: 81 ec 28 02 00 00 sub $0x228,%esp

We're simply overflowing the stack. I changed all of the large on-stack
allocations to 'static', and it actually boots now. I know 'static'
isn't safe, but it was good for a quick test.

A 'make stackcheck' confirms this:

dave@nimitz:~/kernels/linux-2.6.git$ make checkstack
objdump -d vmlinux $(find . -name '*.ko') | \
perl /home/dave/kernels/linux-2.6.git-t61/scripts/checkstack.pl i386
0x000042d3 kvm_arch_vcpu_ioctl [kvm]: 2148
0x000012e3 kvm_vcpu_ioctl [kvm]: 1620
0x00004a83 kvm_arch_vm_ioctl [kvm]: 1332
0x00009a26 airo_get_aplist [airo]: 1140
0x00009b76 airo_get_aplist [airo]: 1140
0x00009c82 airo_get_aplist [airo]: 1140
...

In other words, kvm has the top 3 stack users in my kernel. As you can
see from my trace above, these things also get called with super-long
stacks already. Man. That sucked to find.

Avi, how would you like this fixed? I'd be happy to prepare some
patches. Do you have a particular approach that you think we should
use? Just make the big objects dynamically allocated?

-- Dave