Re: /proc/<pid>/status & task struct locking

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Apr 15 2016 - 14:07:24 EST


On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 9:49 AM, Dave Jones <davej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [<ffffffff811d7b39>] ? seq_vprintf+0x39/0x70
> [<ffffffff811d7b35>] seq_vprintf+0x35/0x70
> Code: 89 cd 49 01 fc 0f 82 18 03 00 00 48 89 7d b0 41 0f b6 07 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 00 84 c0 74 43 48 8d 75 c8 4c 89 ff e8 30 d4 ff ff <0f> b6 55 c8 48 63 c8 4d 8d 34 0f 80 fa 07 0f 87 4c 02 00 00 ff

The code disassembles to

0: 48 89 7d b0 mov %rdi,-0x50(%rbp)
4: 41 0f b6 07 movzbl (%r15),%eax
8: 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 nopl
10: 84 c0 test %al,%al
12: 74 43 je 0x57
14: 48 8d 75 c8 lea -0x38(%rbp),%rsi
18: 4c 89 ff mov %r15,%rdi
1b: e8 30 d4 ff ff callq 0xffffffffffffd450
20:* 0f b6 55 c8 movzbl -0x38(%rbp),%edx <-- trapping instruction
24: 48 63 c8 movslq %eax,%rcx

which is interesting. That "-0x38(%rbp)" was passed (by reference) to
some subroutine, and now that we try to read the value, we take a
fault.

And it makes even less sense because %rbp really seems to be not a
random register, but the frame pointer:

RBP: ffff8801ac52fc78
RSP: ffff8801ac52fc08

So why the *hell* do we get

BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000019

for that? That makes no sense.

Quite frankly, I would not attribute this to /proc/pid/status with
this kind of insane oops.

Maybe I misread your oops, but that just all looks completely bogus.
Even if the stack got corrupted and/or unmapped, how did %cr2 get that
odd "0000000000000019" fault address? None of this makes any sense at
all to me.

What CPU is this on? There was the crazy AMD microcode bug. This looks
even more random, because now the registers look fine, and the oops
just looks bad.

Do you have other versions of the oops for this same problem?

Linus