Re: i386 single-step vs int $0x80 issues

[Jason Wessel]

Roland McGrath wrote:
>> Certainly I am interested in making all the cases work correctly.  The
>> failure behavior was observed on an SMP system.  I re-tested to
>> confirm the problem was still there.
> 
> Please help me reproduce this problem on the old code.  I have not been
> able to see it.  You didn't say whether it was intermittent, nor give any
> more details here.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Roland
> 


It took some further time to understand what is closer to the source
of the problem.  Previously I had just bisected backwards until ptrace
started working again because I knew it had broken between 2.6.14 and
2.6.21.  The test case provided in the patch I submitted either always
fails or always succeeds.  I had a particular machine and file system
that it always failed on.  I reduced the configuration to UP i386 with
a file system that was using full kernel auditing.

It turns out that it is the _TIF_SYSCALL_AUDIT interaction in entry.S
is more likely the culprit here.  This flag was getting turned on as a
result of using kernel/user space auditing.  I found that you can turn
off CONFIG_AUDIT and use the patch below to "simulate" the same
circumstance.  Then you should be able to observe the same failure I
saw directly with a vanilla 2.6.21 i386 kernel.


diff --git a/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S b/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S
diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c
index 6af959c..fb47ab9 100644
--- a/kernel/fork.c
+++ b/kernel/fork.c
@@ -1154,6 +1154,9 @@ static struct task_struct *copy_process(unsigned long clone_flags,
 #ifdef TIF_SYSCALL_EMU
        clear_tsk_thread_flag(p, TIF_SYSCALL_EMU);
 #endif
+       /* HACK to always turn on syscall auditing */
+       set_tsk_thread_flag(p, TIF_SYSCALL_AUDIT);
+       /* end HACK to simulate auditing */
 
        /* Our parent execution domain becomes current domain
           These must match for thread signalling to apply */


Let me know if you need further details, and it certainly means some
further testing is in order against your newer patch.  I am also
interested in what test cases fail that you mentioned in your original
e-mail on this topic.

Thanks,
Jason.
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