Re: [syzbot] INFO: task hung in jbd2_journal_commit_transaction (3)

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, May 20, 2022 at 01:57:07PM +0200, Dmitry Vyukov wrote:
> 
> Hi Ted,
> 
> Reviving this old thread re syzkaller using SCHED_FIFO.
> 
> It's a bit hard to restrict what the fuzzer can do if we give it
> sched_setattr() and friends syscalls. We could remove them from the
> fuzzer entirely, but it's probably suboptimal as well.
> 
> I see that setting up SCHED_FIFO is guarded by CAP_SYS_NICE:
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.18-rc7/source/kernel/sched/core.c#L7264
> 
> And I see we drop CAP_SYS_NICE from the fuzzer process since 2019
> (after a similar discussion):
> https://github.com/google/syzkaller/commit/f3ad68446455a
>
> The latest C reproducer contains: ....

For this particular report, there *was* no C reproducer.  There was
only a syz reproducer:

> syzbot found the following issue on:
> 
> HEAD commit:    5472f14a3742 Merge tag 'for_linus' of git://git.kernel.org..
> git tree:       upstream
> console output: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/x/log.txt?x=11132113b00000
> kernel config:  https://syzkaller.appspot.com/x/.config?x=e3bdfd29b408d1b6
> dashboard link: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=9c3fb12e9128b6e1d7eb
> compiler:       gcc (Debian 10.2.1-6) 10.2.1 20210110, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.35.2
> syz repro:      https://syzkaller.appspot.com/x/repro.syz?x=14559113b00000

So let me ask a counter question.  I thought syzbot tries to create a
minimal reproducer?  So if the sched_setattr is a no-op, and is
returning EPERM, why wasn't the sched_setattr line removed from the
syz repro?

As a side note, since in many cases running a reproducer can be
painful, would it be possible for the syzkiller dashboard to provide
the output of running "strace -f" while the reproducer is running?

That would also especially help since even when there is a C
reproducer, trying to understand what it is doing from reading the
syzbot-generated C source code is often non-trivial, and strace does a
much better job decoding what the !@#?@ the reproducer.  Another
advantage of using strace is that it will also show us the return code
from the system call, which would very quickly confirm whether the
sched_setattr() was actually returning EPERM or not --- and it will
decode the system call arguments in a way that I often wished would be
included as comments in the syzbot-generated reproducer.

Providing the strace output could significantly reduce the amount of
upstream developer toil, and might therefore improve upstream
developer engagement with syzkaller.

Cheers,

						- Ted