kernel/fork: beware of __put_task_struct() calling context
authorWander Lairson Costa <wander@redhat.com>
Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:23:21 +0000 (09:23 -0300)
committerPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:21:48 +0000 (15:21 +0200)
commitd243b34459cea30cfe5f3a9b2feb44e7daff9938
tree6f8b6921e0643bc5d762f0a5b0733f49a4b9ea4f
parent06c2afb862f9da8dc5efa4b6076a0e48c3fbaaa5
kernel/fork: beware of __put_task_struct() calling context

Under PREEMPT_RT, __put_task_struct() indirectly acquires sleeping
locks. Therefore, it can't be called from an non-preemptible context.

One practical example is splat inside inactive_task_timer(), which is
called in a interrupt context:

  CPU: 1 PID: 2848 Comm: life Kdump: loaded Tainted: G W ---------
   Hardware name: HP ProLiant DL388p Gen8, BIOS P70 07/15/2012
   Call Trace:
   dump_stack_lvl+0x57/0x7d
   mark_lock_irq.cold+0x33/0xba
   mark_lock+0x1e7/0x400
   mark_usage+0x11d/0x140
   __lock_acquire+0x30d/0x930
   lock_acquire.part.0+0x9c/0x210
   rt_spin_lock+0x27/0xe0
   refill_obj_stock+0x3d/0x3a0
   kmem_cache_free+0x357/0x560
   inactive_task_timer+0x1ad/0x340
   __run_hrtimer+0x8a/0x1a0
   __hrtimer_run_queues+0x91/0x130
   hrtimer_interrupt+0x10f/0x220
   __sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x7b/0xd0
   sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x4f/0xd0
   asm_sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt+0x12/0x20
   RIP: 0033:0x7fff196bf6f5

Instead of calling __put_task_struct() directly, we defer it using
call_rcu(). A more natural approach would use a workqueue, but since
in PREEMPT_RT, we can't allocate dynamic memory from atomic context,
the code would become more complex because we would need to put the
work_struct instance in the task_struct and initialize it when we
allocate a new task_struct.

The issue is reproducible with stress-ng:

  while true; do
      stress-ng --sched deadline --sched-period 1000000000 \
      --sched-runtime 800000000 --sched-deadline \
      1000000000 --mmapfork 23 -t 20
  done

Reported-by: Hu Chunyu <chuhu@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Valentin Schneider <vschneid@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Wander Lairson Costa <wander@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230614122323.37957-2-wander@redhat.com
include/linux/sched/task.h
kernel/fork.c