Re: Please revert kobject_uevent UMH_NO_WAIT

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Thu Apr 16 2009 - 17:30:43 EST


Greg KH wrote:
On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 09:55:29PM +0100, Hugh Dickins wrote:
Please revert commit f520360d93cdc37de5d972dac4bf3bdef6a7f6a7
"kobject: don't block for each kobject_uevent".

Tetsuo Handa, running a kernel with CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC=y
and CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH=/sbin/hotplug, has been hitting RCU
detected CPU stalls: it's been spinning in the loop where do_execve()
counts up the args (but why wasn't fixup_exception working? dunno).

The recent change, switching kobject_uevent_env() from UMH_WAIT_EXEC
to UMH_NO_WAIT, is broken: the exec uses args on the local stack here,
and an env which is kfreed as soon as call_usermodehelper() returns.
It very much needs to wait for the exec to be done.

Or keep the UMH_NO_WAIT, and complicate the code to allocate and free
these resources correctly? No, as GregKH pointed out when making the
commit, CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH="" is a much better optimization -
though some distros are still saying /sbin/hotplug in their .config,
yet with no such binary in their initrd or their root.

Or...

[PATCH] revert kobject_uevent UMH_NO_WAIT

Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
as well

not worth the hassle if this breaks too much
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