Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] x86/mce: Avoid infinite loop for copy from user recovery

Andy Lutomirski
2021-01-11T22:12:02Z

> On Jan 11, 2021, at 1:45 PM, Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com> wrote:
>
> ﻿Recovery action when get_user() triggers a machine check uses the fixup
> path to make get_user() return -EFAULT. Also queue_task_work() sets up
> so that kill_me_maybe() will be called on return to user mode to send a
> SIGBUS to the current process.
>
> But there are places in the kernel where the code assumes that this
> EFAULT return was simply because of a page fault. The code takes some
> action to fix that, and then retries the access. This results in a second
> machine check.
>
> While processing this second machine check queue_task_work() is called
> again. But since this uses the same callback_head structure that
> was used in the first call, the net result is an entry on the
> current->task_works list that points to itself.

Is this happening in pagefault_disable context or normal sleepable fault context? If the latter, maybe we should reconsider finding a way for the machine check code to do its work inline instead of deferring it.

Yes, I realize this is messy, but maybe it’s not that messy. Conceptually, we just (famous last words) need to arrange for an MCE with IF=1 to switch off the IST stack and run like a normal exception.