task_struct is an internal structure to the kernel with a lot of good
information, that is probably interesting in core dumps. However there is
no way for user space to know what format that information is in making it
useless.
I grepped the GDB 6.3 source code and NT_TASKSTRUCT while defined is not
used anywhere else. So I would be surprised if anyone notices it is
missing.
In addition exporting kernel pointers to all the interesting kernel data
structures sounds like the very definition of an information leak. I
haven't a clue what someone with evil intentions could do with that
information, but in any attack against the kernel it looks like this is the
perfect tool for aiming that attack.
So since NT_TASKSTRUCT is useless as currently defined and is potentially
dangerous, let's just not export it.
(akpm: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> "would be amazed" if anything was
using NT_TASKSTRUCT).
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
How is anon_rss initialized? In dup_mmap, and by mm_alloc's memset; but
that's not so good if an mm_counter_t is a special type. And how is rss
initialized? By set_mm_counter, all over the place. Come on, we just need to
initialize them both at once by set_mm_counter in mm_init (which follows the
memcpy when forking).
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Nir Tzachar <tzachar@cs.bgu.ac.il> points out that if an ELF file specifies a
zero-length bss at a whacky address, we cannot load that binary because
padzero() tries to zero out the end of the page at the whacky address, and
that may not be writeable.
See also http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5411
So teach load_elf_binary() to skip the bss settng altogether if the elf file
has a zero-length bss segment.
Cc: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
Cc: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Ingo recently introduced a great speedup for allocating new mmaps using the
free_area_cache pointer which boosts the specweb SSL benchmark by 4-5% and
causes huge performance increases in thread creation.
The downside of this patch is that it does lead to fragmentation in the
mmap-ed areas (visible via /proc/self/maps), such that some applications
that work fine under 2.4 kernels quickly run out of memory on any 2.6
kernel.
The problem is twofold:
1) the free_area_cache is used to continue a search for memory where
the last search ended. Before the change new areas were always
searched from the base address on.
So now new small areas are cluttering holes of all sizes
throughout the whole mmap-able region whereas before small holes
tended to close holes near the base leaving holes far from the base
large and available for larger requests.
2) the free_area_cache also is set to the location of the last
munmap-ed area so in scenarios where we allocate e.g. five regions of
1K each, then free regions 4 2 3 in this order the next request for 1K
will be placed in the position of the old region 3, whereas before we
appended it to the still active region 1, placing it at the location
of the old region 2. Before we had 1 free region of 2K, now we only
get two free regions of 1K -> fragmentation.
The patch addresses thes issues by introducing yet another cache descriptor
cached_hole_size that contains the largest known hole size below the
current free_area_cache. If a new request comes in the size is compared
against the cached_hole_size and if the request can be filled with a hole
below free_area_cache the search is started from the base instead.
The results look promising: Whereas 2.6.12-rc4 fragments quickly and my
(earlier posted) leakme.c test program terminates after 50000+ iterations
with 96 distinct and fragmented maps in /proc/self/maps it performs nicely
(as expected) with thread creation, Ingo's test_str02 with 20000 threads
requires 0.7s system time.
Taking out Ingo's patch (un-patch available per request) by basically
deleting all mentions of free_area_cache from the kernel and starting the
search for new memory always at the respective bases we observe: leakme
terminates successfully with 11 distinctive hardly fragmented areas in
/proc/self/maps but thread creating is gringdingly slow: 30+s(!) system
time for Ingo's test_str02 with 20000 threads.
Now - drumroll ;-) the appended patch works fine with leakme: it ends with
only 7 distinct areas in /proc/self/maps and also thread creation seems
sufficiently fast with 0.71s for 20000 threads.
Signed-off-by: Wolfgang Wander <wwc@rentec.com>
Credit-to: "Richard Purdie" <rpurdie@rpsys.net>
Signed-off-by: Ken Chen <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> (partly)
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The ELF core dump code has one use of off_t when writing out segments.
Some of the segments may be passed the 2GB limit of an off_t, even on a
32-bit system, so it's important to use loff_t instead. This fixes a
corrupted core dump in the bigcore test in GDB's testsuite.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@codesourcery.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
If arch_setup_additional_pages fails, the error path will do some double-frees.
This fixes it.
Signed-off-by: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch reworks the way the ppc64 is mapped in user memory by the kernel
to make it more robust against possible collisions with executable
segments. Instead of just whacking a VMA at 1Mb, I now use
get_unmapped_area() with a hint, and I moved the mapping of the vDSO to
after the mapping of the various ELF segments and of the interpreter, so
that conflicts get caught properly (it still has to be before
create_elf_tables since the later will fill the AT_SYSINFO_EHDR with the
proper address).
While I was at it, I also changed the 32 and 64 bits vDSO's to link at
their "natural" address of 1Mb instead of 0. This is the address where
they are normally mapped in absence of conflict. By doing so, it should be
possible to properly prelink one it's been verified to work on glibc.
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Eric W. Biederman