Re: [PATCH 0/2] fix the traced mt-exec deadlock

ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) writes:

The big lesson for me, and what was not obvious from your change
description is that we are changing the user space visible semantics
of exec+ptrace and that cred_guard_mutex is not at all the problem (as
we always take cred_guard_mutex in a killable or interruptible way).

Just to follow up.

Because the cred_guard_mutex is fine as is we don't need to move
de_thread out from under cred_guard_mutex.  We just need to change
de_thread to wait until all of the other threads are zombies.
Which should remove about half your proposed patch.

The other key thing is that knowning it isn't cred_guard_mutex let's us
know that this kind of deadlock goes all of the way back to when
CLONE_THREAD was merged into the kernel.

Insteresingly enough looking at zap_other_threads and notify_count I
have found a second bug.  When a multi-threaded processes becomes a
zombie we don't send the notification to the parent process until the
non-leader threads have been reaped.  Which means ptrace can mess up
sending SIGCHLD to the parent.

Now arguably that might be what is desirable but I don't think so.  If
we aren't ptracing a thread then I don't think we want to delay sending
SIGCHLD to the parent.

So this whole area of the semantics of a ptrace'd multi-threaded process
exiting/exec'ing looks like it needs a thorough going over.

Eric