tree 9b92dd8f99c10ae0a0931ce71f3e9a20b32b167b
parent 6598b60fd56ba5e915a001cc4e307880a94d19ae
author Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> 1201960877 +0100
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1201985739 +1100

fix writev regression: pan hanging unkillable and un-straceable

Frederik Himpe reported an unkillable and un-straceable pan process.

Zero length iovecs can go into an infinite loop in writev, because the
iovec iterator does not always advance over them.

The sequence required to trigger this is not trivial. I think it
requires that a zero-length iovec be followed by a non-zero-length iovec
which causes a pagefault in the atomic usercopy. This causes the writev
code to drop back into single-segment copy mode, which then tries to
copy the 0 bytes of the zero-length iovec; a zero length copy looks like
a failure though, so it loops.

Put a test into iov_iter_advance to catch zero-length iovecs. We could
just put the test in the fallback path, but I feel it is more robust to
skip over zero-length iovecs throughout the code (iovec iterator may be
used in filesystems too, so it should be robust).

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>