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authorSalman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>2009-06-04 15:20:39 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2009-06-04 15:20:39 -0700
commit730c586ad5228c339949b2eb4e72b80ae167abc4 (patch)
treeab1d06260232b343bd1d2d7a5d0563500a1de915 /drivers/char
parent2cb7878a3a4341d1faa208de962d66f0817d3e7a (diff)
drivers/char/mem.c: avoid OOM lockup during large reads from /dev/zero
While running 20 parallel instances of dd as follows: #!/bin/bash for i in `seq 1 20`; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/export/hda3/dd_$i bs=1073741824 count=1 & done wait on a 16G machine, we noticed that rather than just killing the processes, the entire kernel went down. Stracing dd reveals that it first does an mmap2, which makes 1GB worth of zero page mappings. Then it performs a read on those pages from /dev/zero, and finally it performs a write. The machine died during the reads. Looking at the code, it was noticed that /dev/zero's read operation had been changed by 557ed1fa2620dc119adb86b34c614e152a629a80 ("remove ZERO_PAGE") from giving zero page mappings to actually zeroing the page. The zeroing of the pages causes physical pages to be allocated to the process. But, when the process exhausts all the memory that it can, the kernel cannot kill it, as it is still in the kernel mode allocating more memory. Consequently, the kernel eventually crashes. To fix this, I propose that when a fatal signal is pending during /dev/zero read operation, we simply return and let the user process die. Signed-off-by: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com> Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> [ Modified error return and comment trivially. - Linus] Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'drivers/char')
-rw-r--r--drivers/char/mem.c3
1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/drivers/char/mem.c b/drivers/char/mem.c
index 8f05c38c2f0..65e12bca657 100644
--- a/drivers/char/mem.c
+++ b/drivers/char/mem.c
@@ -694,6 +694,9 @@ static ssize_t read_zero(struct file * file, char __user * buf,
written += chunk - unwritten;
if (unwritten)
break;
+ /* Consider changing this to just 'signal_pending()' with lots of testing */
+ if (fatal_signal_pending(current))
+ return written ? written : -EINTR;
buf += chunk;
count -= chunk;
cond_resched();