tree a6115a173a221ef80a9ffe9b4f110bd4d92443c5
parent e24650c2e744f99541125a5b023f0d02cad19d14
author Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> 1161068979 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> 1161098323 -0700

[PATCH] posix-cpu-timers: prevent signal delivery starvation

The integer divisions in the timer accounting code can round the result
down to 0.  Adding 0 is without effect and the signal delivery stops.

Clamp the division result to minimum 1 to avoid this.

Problem was reported by Seongbae Park <spark@google.com>, who provided
also an inital patch.

Roland sayeth:

  I have had some more time to think about the problem, and to reproduce it
  using Toyo's test case.  For the record, if my understanding of the problem
  is correct, this happens only in one very particular case.  First, the
  expiry time has to be so soon that in cputime_t units (usually 1s/HZ ticks)
  it's < nthreads so the division yields zero.  Second, it only affects each
  thread that is so new that its CPU time accumulation is zero so now+0 is
  still zero and ->it_*_expires winds up staying zero.  For the VIRT and PROF
  clocks when cputime_t is tick granularity (or the SCHED clock on
  configurations where sched_clock's value only advances on clock ticks), this
  is not hard to arrange with new threads starting up and blocking before they
  accumulate a whole tick of CPU time.  That's what happens in Toyo's test
  case.

  Note that in general it is fine for that division to round down to zero,
  and set each thread's expiry time to its "now" time.  The problem only
  arises with thread's whose "now" value is still zero, so that now+0 winds up
  0 and is interpreted as "not set" instead of ">= now".  So it would be a
  sufficient and more precise fix to just use max(ticks, 1) inside the loop
  when setting each it_*_expires value.

  But, it does no harm to round the division up to one and always advance
  every thread's expiry time.  If the thread didn't already fire timers for
  the expiry time of "now", there is no expectation that it will do so before
  the next tick anyway.  So I followed Thomas's patch in lifting the max out
  of the loops.

  This patch also covers the reload cases, which are harder to write a test
  for (and I didn't try).  I've tested it with Toyo's case and it fixes that.

[toyoa@mvista.com: fix: min_t -> max_t]
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
Cc: Daniel Walker <dwalker@mvista.com>
Cc: Toyo Abe <toyoa@mvista.com>
Cc: john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: Seongbae Park <spark@google.com>
Cc: Peter Mattis <pmattis@google.com>
Cc: Rohit Seth <rohitseth@google.com>
Cc: Martin Bligh <mbligh@google.com>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>