Re: Null pointer crash at find_idlest_group on db845c w/ linus/master

From: Qais Yousef
Date: Wed Dec 04 2019 - 08:32:31 EST


On 12/04/19 13:08, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 11:41, Valentin Schneider
> <valentin.schneider@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On 04/12/2019 10:09, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > > Now, we test that a group has at least one allowed CPU for the task so we
> > > could skip the local group with the correct/wrong p->cpus_ptr
> > >
> > > The path is used for fork/exec ibut also for wakeup path for b.L when the task doesn't fit in the CPUs
> > >
> > > So we can probably imagine a scenario where we change task affinity while
> > > sleeping. If the wakeup happens on a CPU that belongs to the group that is not
> > > allowed, we can imagine that we skip the local_group
> > >
> >
> > Shoot, I think you're right. If it is the local group that is NULL, then
> > we most likely splat on:
> >
> > if (local->sgc->max_capacity >= idlest->sgc->max_capacity)
> > return NULL;
> >
> > We don't splat before because we just use local_sgs, which is uninitialized
> > but on the stack.
> >
> > Also; does it really have to involve an affinity "race"? AFAIU affinity
> > could have been changed a while back, but the waking CPU isn't allowed
> > so we skip the local_group (in simpler cases where each CPU is a group).
>
> In fact, this will depend of the uninitialized values of local_sgs. I
> have been able to reproduce the situation where we skip local group
> but not to trigger the crash because the values already in the stack
> don't trigger the misfit comparison.

Will it be expensive to initialize local_sgs = {0}?

--
Qais Yousef