Re: Odd ENOMEM being returned in 3.8-rcX

[Eric W. Biederman]

Josh Boyer <jwboyer@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> < Two emails fly past each other in the night >

Yep.

>> My best guess in some dark corner of mock has untested code to unshare a
>> pid namespace, and that corner started doing something now that
>> unsharing of the pid namespace actually works.
>> 
>> If mock has called unshare(CLONE_NEWPID). And then forked a process and
>> that process exited, and then forked anothe process that second and all
>> subsequent fork calls will fail with -ENOMEM (because init has exited in
>> the pid namespace).  -ENOMEM will be generated because of a failure of
>> alloc_pid.
>> 
>> Looking at that code path a little closer that just about has to be it,
>> because I goofed and the error path drops the lock but not irqs.  The
>> patch below should fix the nasty warning and confirm where the code is
>> failing in copy_process.
>
> OK.  I'll turn the debug option back on and give this patch a try.

Thanks.  Your minimal test case also confirms my hunch. But we should
fix the error path as well.

>> An strace to see which syscalls mock is making and with which flags
>> would be very interesting.  I am almost certain that there is a
>> unshare(CLONE_NEWPID) somewhere in there.  But in a remote corner of
>> possibility it could weird clone flags, or something else.
>
> Oh, I have that but it's a python app with a helper C app and it's a...
> verbose strace.  It's here for one failure:
>
> http://jwboyer.fedorapeople.org/pub/mock-strace
>
> Hopefully the testcase from my other email will help though.  It's much
> simpler.

Yes.  Your other test case confirms my patch you bisected this to is
working correctly.

>> Beyond that I suspect we want to work with the mock folks so they get
>> their code to use a pid namespace working the way they intended.
>
> Right.  CC'd Clark (for real this time).
>
> I'll let you know on the patch.

Cool.  Looking at the strace I can't figure out what mock expected
to happen or how mock was working before this.  As mock is calling
unshare(CLONE_NEWNS|CLONE_NEWUTS|CLONE_NEWIPC|CLONE_NEWPID) all in one
go.

Previous to my patch enabling CLONE_NEWPID that would cause the unshare
to fail.

So it looks mock is taking a buggy untested code path and things are not
working as it expected.

Eric

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