Re: [GIT PULL] Please pull proc and exec work for 5.7-rc1

Linus Torvalds
2020-04-09T16:24:47Z

On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 9:15 AM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> may_ptrace_stop() is supposed to stop the blocking exactly so that it
> doesn't deadlock.
>
> I wonder why that doesn't work..
>
> [ Goes and look ]
>
> Oh. I see.
>
> That ptrace_may_stop() only ever considered core-dumping, not execve().
>
> But if _that_ is the reason for the deadlock, then it's trivially fixed.

So maybe may_ptrace_stop() should just do something like this
(ENTIRELY UNTESTED):

struct task_struct *me = current, *parent = me->parent;

if (!likely(me->ptrace))
return false;

/* If the parent is exiting or core-dumping, it's not
listening to our signals */
if (parent->signal->flags & (SIGNAL_GROUP_EXIT | SIGNAL_GROUP_COREDUMP))
return false;

/* if the parent is going through a execve(), it's not listening */
if (parent->signal->group_exit_task)
return false;

return true;

instead of the fairly ad-hoc tests for core-dumping.

The above is hand-wavy - I didn't think a lot about locking.
may_ptrace_stop() is already called under the tasklist_lock, so the
parent won't change, but maybe it should take the signal lock?

So the above very much is *not* meant to be a "do it like this", more
of a "this direction, maybe"?

The existing code is definitely broken. It special-cases core-dumping
probably simply because that's the only case people had realized, and
not thought of the execve() thing.

Linus