[PATCH] fix for potential deadlock after posix-timers change

Ulrich has been working on the glibc code using posix-timers and
stressing it more now than it has before.  He ran into an SMP deadlock
on process exit in the case there are pending queued signals from a
timer.

The deadlock arises because in the path through exit_itimers, the
tasklist_lock is already held (for writing).  When a timer is being
deleted, sigqueue_free will try to take it (for reading) in the case
where that timer has a pending signal queued on somebody's queue.  This
patch avoids the problem by making sure the queues are flushed before
calling exit_itimers, thus ensuring its code path won't try to take
tasklist_lock.

1 files changed, 19 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/signal.c b/kernel/signal.c
index 0232084c1f65..a9181552a76e 100644
--- a/kernel/signal.c
+++ b/kernel/signal.c
@@ -352,10 +352,8 @@ void __exit_signal(struct task_struct *tsk)
 		if (tsk == sig->curr_target)
 			sig->curr_target = next_thread(tsk);
 		tsk->signal = NULL;
-		exit_itimers(sig);
 		spin_unlock(&sighand->siglock);
 		flush_sigqueue(&sig->shared_pending);
-		kmem_cache_free(signal_cachep, sig);
 	} else {
 		/*
 		 * If there is any task waiting for the group exit
@@ -369,9 +367,28 @@ void __exit_signal(struct task_struct *tsk)
 			sig->curr_target = next_thread(tsk);
 		tsk->signal = NULL;
 		spin_unlock(&sighand->siglock);
+		sig = NULL;	/* Marker for below.  */
 	}
 	clear_tsk_thread_flag(tsk,TIF_SIGPENDING);
 	flush_sigqueue(&tsk->pending);
+	if (sig) {
+		/*
+		 * We are cleaning up the signal_struct here.  We delayed
+		 * calling exit_itimers until after flush_sigqueue, just in
+		 * case our thread-local pending queue contained a queued
+		 * timer signal that would have been cleared in
+		 * exit_itimers.  When that called sigqueue_free, it would
+		 * attempt to re-take the tasklist_lock and deadlock.  This
+		 * can never happen if we ensure that all queues the
+		 * timer's signal might be queued on have been flushed
+		 * first.  The shared_pending queue, and our own pending
+		 * queue are the only queues the timer could be on, since
+		 * there are no other threads left in the group and timer
+		 * signals are constrained to threads inside the group.
+		 */
+		exit_itimers(sig);
+		kmem_cache_free(signal_cachep, sig);
+	}
 }
 
 void exit_signal(struct task_struct *tsk)