[PATCH 1/8] signal: Make SIGKILL during coredumps an explicit special case

Eric W. Biederman
2021-12-13T22:54:41Z

Simplify the code that allows SIGKILL during coredumps to terminate
the coredump. As far as I can tell I have avoided breaking it
by dumb luck.

Historically with all of the other threads stopping in exit_mm the
wants_signal loop in complete_signal would find the dumper task and
then complete_signal would wake the dumper task with signal_wake_up.

After moving the coredump_task_exit above the setting of PF_EXITING in
commit 92307383082d ("coredump: Don't perform any cleanups before
dumping core") wants_signal will consider all of the threads in a
multi-threaded process for waking up, not just the core dumping task.

Luckily complete_signal short circuits SIGKILL during a coredump marks
every thread with SIGKILL and signal_wake_up. This code is arguably
buggy however as it tries to skip creating a group exit when is already
present, and it fails that a coredump is in progress.

Ever since commit 06af8679449d ("coredump: Limit what can interrupt
coredumps") was added dump_interrupted needs not just TIF_SIGPENDING
set on the dumper task but also SIGKILL set in it's pending bitmap.
This means that if the code is ever fixed not to short-circuit and
kill a process after it has already been killed the special case
for SIGKILL during a coredump will be broken.

Sort all of this out by making the coredump special case more special,
and perform all of the work in prepare_signal and leave the rest of
the signal delivery path out of it.

In prepare_signal when the process coredumping is sent SIGKILL find
the task performing the coredump and use sigaddset and signal_wake_up
to ensure that task reports fatal_signal_pending.

Return false from prepare_signal to tell the rest of the signal
delivery path to ignore the signal.

Update wait_for_dump_helpers to perform a wait_event_killable wait
so that if signal_pending gets set spuriously the wait will not
be interrupted unless fatal_signal_pending is true.

I have tested this and verified I did not break SIGKILL during
coredumps by accident (before or after this change). I actually
thought I had and I had to figure out what I had misread that kept
SIGKILL during coredumps working.

Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
---
fs/coredump.c | 4 ++--
kernel/signal.c | 11 +++++++++--
2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/coredump.c b/fs/coredump.c
index a6b3c196cdef..7b91fb32dbb8 100644
--- a/fs/coredump.c
+++ b/fs/coredump.c
@@ -448,7 +448,7 @@ static void coredump_finish(bool core_dumped)
static bool dump_interrupted(void)
{
/*
- * SIGKILL or freezing() interrupt the coredumping. Perhaps we
+ * SIGKILL or freezing() interrupted the coredumping. Perhaps we
* can do try_to_freeze() and check __fatal_signal_pending(),
* but then we need to teach dump_write() to restart and clear
* TIF_SIGPENDING.
@@ -471,7 +471,7 @@ static void wait_for_dump_helpers(struct file *file)
* We actually want wait_event_freezable() but then we need
* to clear TIF_SIGPENDING and improve dump_interrupted().
*/
- wait_event_interruptible(pipe->rd_wait, pipe->readers == 1);
+ wait_event_killable(pipe->rd_wait, pipe->readers == 1);

pipe_lock(pipe);
pipe->readers--;
diff --git a/kernel/signal.c b/kernel/signal.c
index 8272cac5f429..7e305a8ec7c2 100644
--- a/kernel/signal.c
+++ b/kernel/signal.c
@@ -907,8 +907,15 @@ static bool prepare_signal(int sig, struct task_struct *p, bool force)
sigset_t flush;

if (signal->flags & (SIGNAL_GROUP_EXIT | SIGNAL_GROUP_COREDUMP)) {
- if (!(signal->flags & SIGNAL_GROUP_EXIT))
- return sig == SIGKILL;
+ struct core_state *core_state = signal->core_state;
+ if (core_state) {
+ if (sig == SIGKILL) {
+ struct task_struct *dumper = core_state->dumper.task;
+ sigaddset(&dumper->pending.signal, SIGKILL);
+ signal_wake_up(dumper, 1);
+ }
+ return false;
+ }
/*
* The process is in the middle of dying, nothing to do.
*/
--
2.29.2