• Anton Blanchard's avatar
    [PATCH] ppc64: User tasks must have a valid thread.regs · 8259f7f6
    Anton Blanchard authored
    There have been reports of problems running UP ppc64 kernels where the
    kernel would die in the floating point save/restore code.
    
    It turns out kernel threads that call exec (and so become user tasks) do
    not have a valid thread.regs.  This means init (pid 1) does not, it also
    means anything called out of exec_usermodehelper does not.  Once that task
    has forked (eg init), then the thread.regs in the new task is correctly
    set.
    
    On UP do lazy save/restore of floating point regs.  The SLES9 init is doing
    floating point (the debian version of init appears not to).  The lack of
    thread.regs in init combined with the fact that it does floating point
    leads to our lazy FP save/restore code blowing up.
    
    There were other places where this problem exhibited itself in weird and
    interesting ways.  If a task being exec'ed out of a kernel thread used more
    than 1MB of stack, it would be terminated due to the checks in
    arch/ppc64/mm/fault.c (looking for a valid thread.regs when extending the
    stack).  We had a test case using the tux webserver that was failing due to
    this.
    
    Since we zero all registers in ELF_PLAT_INIT, I removed the extra memset
    in start_thread32.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAnton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    8259f7f6
process.c 16 KB