Re: 2.6.33-rc8 breaks UML with Restrict initial stack spaceexpansion to rlimit

From: Jouni Malinen
Date: Mon Feb 15 2010 - 01:56:44 EST


On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 09:03:39AM +1100, Michael Neuling wrote:
> Crud, the "killed" is definitely something this patch could cause.
>
> I'm not familiar with UML. Is this the guest and the host booting rc8,
> or just the host? Does UML use stack protection at all?

Only the guest was booting rc8 (host is Ubuntu 2.6.31-19-generic), i.e.,
the issue shows up in the guest kernel after rc8 (and is removed by
reverting 803bf5). I do not know whether stack protection is used.

> Can you try booting the guest to init=/bin/sh and try running some tests
> to see what you can set 'ulimit -s' to and still be able to run a simple
> command like '/bin/ls'?

With 803bf5 included, init=/bin/sh seems to fail the boot quite
frequently, but not always. Once I get to shell on the UML guest,
/bin/ls fails about half of the time (e.g., running /bin/ls in /root
failed six times out of ten). This was before touching ulimit -s at all
("ulimit -s" shows 8192).

The behavior of 'ls' run with various ulimit -s values:

24-10000: OK or Killed
16-23: OK or Segmentation fault or Killed
1-15: Killed or Segmentation fault

I have no idea what is causing the random behavior in the results, but
anyway, it looks like 'ulimit -s 23' is the first point where
segmentation faults start showing up and 'ulimit -s 15' is the point
where ls fails every time.


If I start the guest (normal boot with multiple virtual consoles) with
803bf5 reverted, 'ulimit -s 84' has /bin/ls working every time and
'ulimit -s 83' makes it fail every time.

--
Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA
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