Re: [PATCH] proc: readdir race fix (take 3)

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Jean Delvare <jdelvare@suse.de> writes:

> On Thursday 7 September 2006 00:43, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Have you tested 2.6.18-rc6 without my patch?
>
> Yes I did, it didn't crash after a couple hours. Of course it doesn't 
> prove anything as the crash appears to be the result of a race.
>
> I'll now apply Oleg's fix and see if things get better.
>
>> I guess the practical question is what was your test methodology to
>> reproduce this problem?  A couple of more people running the same
>> test on a few more machines might at least give us confidence in what
>> is going on.
>
> "My" test program forks 1000 children who sleep for 1 second then look for 
> themselves in /proc, warn if they can't find themselves, and exit. So 
> basically the idea is that the process list will shrink very rapidly at 
> the same moment every child does readdir(/proc).
>
> I attached the test program, I take no credit (nor shame) for it, it was 
> provided to me by IBM (possibly on behalf of one of their own customers) 
> as a way to demonstrate and reproduce the original readdir(/proc) race 
> bug.

Ok.  So whatever is creating lots of child threads that tripped you
up is probably peculiar to the environment on your laptop.

Eric