Signal handling in a page fault handler

Matthew Wilcox willy at infradead.org
Wed Apr 4 16:24:33 UTC 2018


On Wed, Apr 04, 2018 at 05:15:46PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 4:39 PM, Matthew Wilcox <willy at infradead.org> wrote:
> > I actually have plans to allow mutex_lock_{interruptible,killable} to
> > return -EWOULDBLOCK if a flag is set.  So this doesn't seem entirely
> > unrelated.  Something like this perhaps:
> >
> >  struct task_struct {
> > +       unsigned int sleep_state;
> >  };
> >
> >  static noinline int __sched
> > -__mutex_lock_interruptible_slowpath(struct mutex *lock)
> > +__mutex_lock_slowpath(struct mutex *lock, long state)
> >  {
> > -       return __mutex_lock(lock, TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE, 0, NULL, _RET_IP_);
> > +       if (state == TASK_NOBLOCK)
> > +               return -EWOULDBLOCK;
> > +       return __mutex_lock(lock, state, 0, NULL, _RET_IP_);
> >  }
> >
> > +int __sched mutex_lock_state(struct mutex *lock, long state)
> > +{
> > +       might_sleep();
> > +
> > +       if (__mutex_trylock_fast(lock))
> > +               return 0;
> > +
> > +       return __mutex_lock_slowpath(lock, state);
> > +}
> > +EXPORT_SYMBOL(mutex_lock_state);
> >
> > Then the page fault handler can do something like:
> >
> >         old_state = current->sleep_state;
> >         current->sleep_state = TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE;
> >         ...
> >         current->sleep_state = old_state;
> >
> >
> > This has the page-fault-in-a-signal-handler problem.  I don't know if
> > there's a way to determine if we're already in a signal handler and use
> > a different sleep_state ...?
> 
> Not sure what problem you're trying to solve, but I don't think that's
> the one we have. The only way what we do goes wrong is if the fault
> originates from kernel context. For faults from the signal handler I
> think you just get to keep the pieces. Faults form kernel we can
> detect through FAULT_FLAG_USER.

Gah, I didn't explain well enough ;-(

>From the get_user_pages (and similar) handlers, we'd do

         old_state = current->sleep_state;
         current->sleep_state = TASK_KILLABLE;
         ...
         current->sleep_state = old_state;

So you wouldn't need to discriminate on whether FAULT_FLAG_USER was set,
but could just use current->sleep_state.

> The issue I'm seeing is the following:
> 1. Some kernel code does copy_*_user, and it points at a gpu mmap region.
> 2. We fault and go into the gpu driver fault handler. That refuses to
> insert the pte because a signal is pending (because of all the
> interruptible waits and locks).
> 3. Fixup section runs, which afaict tries to do the copy once more
> using copy_user_handle_tail.
> 4. We fault again, because the pte is still not present.
> 5. GPU driver is still refusing to install the pte because signals are pending.
> 6. Fixup section for copy_user_handle_tail just bails out.
> 7. copy_*_user returns and indicates that that not all bytes have been copied.
> 8. syscall (or whatever it is) bails out and returns to userspace,
> most likely with -EFAULT (but this ofc depends upon the syscall and
> what it should do when userspace access faults.
> 9. Signal finally gets handled, but the syscall already failed, and no
> one will restart it. If userspace is prudent, it might fail (or maybe
> hit an assert or something).

I think my patch above fixes this.  It makes the syscall killable rather
than interruptible, so it can never observe the short read / -EFAULT
return if it gets a fatal signal, and the non-fatal signal will be held
off until the syscall completes.

> Or maybe I'm confused by your diff, since nothing seems to use
> current->sleep_state. The problem is also that it's any sleep we do
> (they all tend to be interruptible, at least when waiting for the gpu
> or taking any locks that might be held while waiting for the gpu, or
> anything else that might be blocked waiting for the gpu really). So
> only patching mutex_lock won't fix this.

Sure, I was only patching mutex_lock_state in as an illustration.
I've also got a 'state' equivalent for wait_on_page_bit() (although
I'm not sure you care ...).

Looks like you'd need wait_for_completion_state() and
wait_event_state_timeout() as well.



More information about the dri-devel mailing list