linux-toradex.git/Documentation/sysctl, branch v3.18-rc6

coredump: add %i/%I in core_pattern to report the tid of the crashed thread

2014-10-14T00:18:21+00:00

format_corename() can only pass the leader's pid to the core handler,
but there is no simple way to figure out which thread originated the
coredump.

As Jan explains, this also means that there is no simple way to create
the backtrace of the crashed process:

As programs are mostly compiled with implicit gcc -fomit-frame-pointer
one needs program's .eh_frame section (equivalently PT_GNU_EH_FRAME
segment) or .debug_frame section.  .debug_frame usually is present only
in separate debug info files usually not even installed on the system.
While .eh_frame is a part of the executable/library (and it is even
always mapped for C++ exceptions unwinding) it no longer has to be
present anywhere on the disk as the program could be upgraded in the
meantime and the running instance has its executable file already
unlinked from disk.

One possibility is to echo 0x3f >/proc/*/coredump_filter and dump all
the file-backed memory including the executable's .eh_frame section.
But that can create huge core files, for example even due to mmapped
data files.

Other possibility would be to read .eh_frame from /proc/PID/mem at the
core_pattern handler time of the core dump.  For the backtrace one needs
to read the register state first which can be done from core_pattern
handler:

    ptrace(PTRACE_SEIZE, tid, 0, PTRACE_O_TRACEEXIT)
    close(0);    // close pipe fd to resume the sleeping dumper
    waitpid();   // should report EXIT
    PTRACE_GETREGS or other requests

The remaining problem is how to get the 'tid' value of the crashed
thread.  It could be read from the first NT_PRSTATUS note of the core
file but that makes the core_pattern handler complicated.

Unfortunately %t is already used so this patch uses %i/%I.

Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (https://github.com/abrt/abrt/wiki/overview)
is experimenting with this.  It is using the elfutils
(https://fedorahosted.org/elfutils/) unwinder for generating the
backtraces.  Apart from not needing matching executables as mentioned
above, another advantage is that we can get the backtrace without saving
the core (which might be quite large) to disk.

[mmilata@redhat.com: final paragraph of changelog]
Signed-off-by: Jan Kratochvil 
Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov 
Cc: Alexander Viro 
Cc: Denys Vlasenko 
Cc: Jan Kratochvil 
Cc: Mark Wielaard 
Cc: Martin Milata 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

tipc: add name distributor resiliency queue

2014-09-02T00:51:48+00:00

TIPC name table updates are distributed asynchronously in a cluster,
entailing a risk of certain race conditions. E.g., if two nodes
simultaneously issue conflicting (overlapping) publications, this may
not be detected until both publications have reached a third node, in
which case one of the publications will be silently dropped on that
node. Hence, we end up with an inconsistent name table.

In most cases this conflict is just a temporary race, e.g., one
node is issuing a publication under the assumption that a previous,
conflicting, publication has already been withdrawn by the other node.
However, because of the (rtt related) distributed update delay, this
may not yet hold true on all nodes. The symptom of this failure is a
syslog message: "tipc: Cannot publish {%u,%u,%u}, overlap error".

In this commit we add a resiliency queue at the receiving end of
the name table distributor. When insertion of an arriving publication
fails, we retain it in this queue for a short amount of time, assuming
that another update will arrive very soon and clear the conflict. If so
happens, we insert the publication, otherwise we drop it.

The (configurable) retention value defaults to 2000 ms. Knowing from
experience that the situation described above is extremely rare, there
is no risk that the queue will accumulate any large number of items.

Signed-off-by: Erik Hugne 
Signed-off-by: Jon Maloy 
Acked-by: Ying Xue 
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller

panic: add TAINT_SOFTLOCKUP

2014-08-08T22:57:24+00:00

This taint flag will be set if the system has ever entered a softlockup
state.  Similar to TAINT_WARN it is useful to know whether or not the
system has been in a softlockup state when debugging.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: apply the taint before calling panic()]
Signed-off-by: Josh Hunt 
Cc: Jason Baron 
Cc: Randy Dunlap 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

kernel/watchdog.c: print traces for all cpus on lockup detection

2014-06-23T23:47:44+00:00

A 'softlockup' is defined as a bug that causes the kernel to loop in
kernel mode for more than a predefined period to time, without giving
other tasks a chance to run.

Currently, upon detection of this condition by the per-cpu watchdog
task, debug information (including a stack trace) is sent to the system
log.

On some occasions, we have observed that the "victim" rather than the
actual "culprit" (i.e.  the owner/holder of the contended resource) is
reported to the user.  Often this information has proven to be
insufficient to assist debugging efforts.

To avoid loss of useful debug information, for architectures which
support NMI, this patch makes it possible to improve soft lockup
reporting.  This is accomplished by issuing an NMI to each cpu to obtain
a stack trace.

If NMI is not supported we just revert back to the old method.  A sysctl
and boot-time parameter is available to toggle this feature.

[dzickus@redhat.com: add CONFIG_SMP in certain areas]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: additional CONFIG_SMP=n optimisations]
[mq@suse.cz: fix warning]
Signed-off-by: Aaron Tomlin 
Signed-off-by: Don Zickus 
Cc: David S. Miller 
Cc: Mateusz Guzik 
Cc: Oleg Nesterov 
Signed-off-by: Jan Moskyto Matejka 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, pcp: allow restoring percpu_pagelist_fraction default

2014-06-23T23:47:43+00:00

Oleg reports a division by zero error on zero-length write() to the
percpu_pagelist_fraction sysctl:

    divide error: 0000 [#1] SMP DEBUG_PAGEALLOC
    CPU: 1 PID: 9142 Comm: badarea_io Not tainted 3.15.0-rc2-vm-nfs+ #19
    Hardware name: Bochs Bochs, BIOS Bochs 01/01/2011
    task: ffff8800d5aeb6e0 ti: ffff8800d87a2000 task.ti: ffff8800d87a2000
    RIP: 0010: percpu_pagelist_fraction_sysctl_handler+0x84/0x120
    RSP: 0018:ffff8800d87a3e78  EFLAGS: 00010246
    RAX: 0000000000000f89 RBX: ffff88011f7fd000 RCX: 0000000000000000
    RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000001 RDI: 0000000000000010
    RBP: ffff8800d87a3e98 R08: ffffffff81d002c8 R09: ffff8800d87a3f50
    R10: 000000000000000b R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 0000000000000060
    R13: ffffffff81c3c3e0 R14: ffffffff81cfddf8 R15: ffff8801193b0800
    FS:  00007f614f1e9740(0000) GS:ffff88011f440000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
    CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 000000008005003b
    CR2: 00007f614f1fa000 CR3: 00000000d9291000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
    Call Trace:
      proc_sys_call_handler+0xb3/0xc0
      proc_sys_write+0x14/0x20
      vfs_write+0xba/0x1e0
      SyS_write+0x46/0xb0
      tracesys+0xe1/0xe6

However, if the percpu_pagelist_fraction sysctl is set by the user, it
is also impossible to restore it to the kernel default since the user
cannot write 0 to the sysctl.

This patch allows the user to write 0 to restore the default behavior.
It still requires a fraction equal to or larger than 8, however, as
stated by the documentation for sanity.  If a value in the range [1, 7]
is written, the sysctl will return EINVAL.

This successfully solves the divide by zero issue at the same time.

Signed-off-by: David Rientjes 
Reported-by: Oleg Drokin 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

sysctl: allow for strict write position handling

2014-06-06T23:08:13+00:00

When writing to a sysctl string, each write, regardless of VFS position,
begins writing the string from the start.  This means the contents of
the last write to the sysctl controls the string contents instead of the
first:

  open("/proc/sys/kernel/modprobe", O_WRONLY)   = 1
  write(1, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"..., 4096) = 4096
  write(1, "/bin/true", 9)                = 9
  close(1)                                = 0

  $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe
  /bin/true

Expected behaviour would be to have the sysctl be "AAAA..." capped at
maxlen (in this case KMOD_PATH_LEN: 256), instead of truncating to the
contents of the second write.  Similarly, multiple short writes would
not append to the sysctl.

The old behavior is unlike regular POSIX files enough that doing audits
of software that interact with sysctls can end up in unexpected or
dangerous situations.  For example, "as long as the input starts with a
trusted path" turns out to be an insufficient filter, as what must also
happen is for the input to be entirely contained in a single write
syscall -- not a common consideration, especially for high level tools.

This provides kernel.sysctl_writes_strict as a way to make this behavior
act in a less surprising manner for strings, and disallows non-zero file
position when writing numeric sysctls (similar to what is already done
when reading from non-zero file positions).  For now, the default (0) is
to warn about non-zero file position use, but retain the legacy
behavior.  Setting this to -1 disables the warning, and setting this to
1 enables the file position respecting behavior.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: move misplaced hunk, per Randy]
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook 
Cc: Randy Dunlap 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: clarify vfs_cache_pressure description

2014-06-04T23:54:13+00:00

Existing description is worded in a way which almost encourages setting of
vfs_cache_pressure above 100, possibly way above it.

Users are left in a dark what this numeric value is - an int?  a
percentage?  what the scale is?

As a result, we are getting reports about noticeable performance
degradation from users who have set vfs_cache_pressure to ridiculously
high values - because they thought there is no downside to it.

Via code inspection it's obvious that this value is treated as a
percentage.  This patch changes text to reflect this fact, and adds a
cautionary paragraph advising against setting vfs_cache_pressure sky high.

Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko 
Cc: Alexander Viro 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: disable zone_reclaim_mode by default

2014-06-04T23:53:59+00:00

When it was introduced, zone_reclaim_mode made sense as NUMA distances
punished and workloads were generally partitioned to fit into a NUMA
node.  NUMA machines are now common but few of the workloads are
NUMA-aware and it's routine to see major performance degradation due to
zone_reclaim_mode being enabled but relatively few can identify the
problem.

Those that require zone_reclaim_mode are likely to be able to detect
when it needs to be enabled and tune appropriately so lets have a
sensible default for the bulk of users.

This patch (of 2):

zone_reclaim_mode causes processes to prefer reclaiming memory from
local node instead of spilling over to other nodes.  This made sense
initially when NUMA machines were almost exclusively HPC and the
workload was partitioned into nodes.  The NUMA penalties were
sufficiently high to justify reclaiming the memory.  On current machines
and workloads it is often the case that zone_reclaim_mode destroys
performance but not all users know how to detect this.  Favour the
common case and disable it by default.  Users that are sophisticated
enough to know they need zone_reclaim_mode will detect it.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Zhang Yanfei 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Reviewed-by: Christoph Lameter 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

hung_task: check the value of "sysctl_hung_task_timeout_sec"

2014-04-07T23:36:07+00:00

As sysctl_hung_task_timeout_sec is unsigned long, when this value is
larger then LONG_MAX/HZ, the function schedule_timeout_interruptible in
watchdog will return immediately without sleep and with print :

  schedule_timeout: wrong timeout value ffffffffffffff83

and then the funtion watchdog will call schedule_timeout_interruptible
again and again.  The screen will be filled with

	"schedule_timeout: wrong timeout value ffffffffffffff83"

This patch does some check and correction in sysctl, to let the function
schedule_timeout_interruptible allways get the valid parameter.

Signed-off-by: Liu Hua 
Tested-by: Satoru Takeuchi 
Cc: 	[3.4+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Merge tag 'modules-next-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rusty/linux

2014-04-06T16:38:07+00:00

Pull module updates from Rusty Russell:
 "Nothing major: the stricter permissions checking for sysfs broke a
  staging driver; fix included.  Greg KH said he'd take the patch but
  hadn't as the merge window opened, so it's included here to avoid
  breaking build"

* tag 'modules-next-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rusty/linux:
  staging: fix up speakup kobject mode
  Use 'E' instead of 'X' for unsigned module taint flag.
  VERIFY_OCTAL_PERMISSIONS: stricter checking for sysfs perms.
  kallsyms: fix percpu vars on x86-64 with relocation.
  kallsyms: generalize address range checking
  module: LLVMLinux: Remove unused function warning from __param_check macro
  Fix: module signature vs tracepoints: add new TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
  module: remove MODULE_GENERIC_TABLE
  module: allow multiple calls to MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE() per module
  module: use pr_cont