• Will Deacon's avatar
    proc: clear_refs: do not clear reserved pages · 85e72aa5
    Will Deacon authored
    /proc/pid/clear_refs is used to clear the Referenced and YOUNG bits for
    pages and corresponding page table entries of the task with PID pid, which
    includes any special mappings inserted into the page tables in order to
    provide things like vDSOs and user helper functions.
    
    On ARM this causes a problem because the vectors page is mapped as a
    global mapping and since ec706dab ("ARM: add a vma entry for the user
    accessible vector page"), a VMA is also inserted into each task for this
    page to aid unwinding through signals and syscall restarts.  Since the
    vectors page is required for handling faults, clearing the YOUNG bit (and
    subsequently writing a faulting pte) means that we lose the vectors page
    *globally* and cannot fault it back in.  This results in a system deadlock
    on the next exception.
    
    To see this problem in action, just run:
    
    	$ echo 1 > /proc/self/clear_refs
    
    on an ARM platform (as any user) and watch your system hang.  I think this
    has been the case since 2.6.37
    
    This patch avoids clearing the aforementioned bits for reserved pages,
    therefore leaving the vectors page intact on ARM.  Since reserved pages
    are not candidates for swap, this change should not have any impact on the
    usefulness of clear_refs.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarWill Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>
    Reported-by: default avatarMoussa Ba <moussaba@micron.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
    Acked-by: default avatarNicolas Pitre <nico@linaro.org>
    Cc: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
    Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>		[2.6.37+]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    85e72aa5
task_mmu.c 27.1 KB