• Jeff Dike's avatar
    [PATCH] uml: fix 2.6.20 hang · 838e56a1
    Jeff Dike authored
    A previous cleanup misused need_poll, which had a fairly broken interface.
    It implemented a growable array, changing the used elements count itself,
    but leaving it up to the caller to fill in the actual elements, including
    the entire array if the array had to be reallocated.  This worked because
    the previous users were switching between two such structures, and the
    elements were copied from the inactive array to the active array after
    making sure the active array had enough room.
    
    maybe_sigio_broken was made to use need_poll, but it was operating on a
    single array, so when the buffer was reallocated, the previous contents
    were lost.
    
    This patch makes need_poll implement more sane semantics.  It merely
    assures that the array is of the proper size and that the contents are
    preserved.  It is up to the caller to adjust the used elements count and to
    ensure that the proper elements are resent.
    
    This manifested itself as a hang in 2.6.20 as the uninitialized buffer
    convinced UML that one of its own file descriptors didn't support SIGIO and
    needed to be watched by poll in a separate thread.  The result was an
    interrupt flood as control traffic over this descriptor sparked interrupts,
    which resulted in more control traffic, ad nauseum.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
    Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    838e56a1
sigio.c 7.43 KB