linux-kernel - Re: Odd ENOMEM being returned in 3.8-rcX

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Date:	Fri, 8 Feb 2013 13:19:49 -0500
From:	Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...hat.com>
To:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
Cc:	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Odd ENOMEM being returned in 3.8-rcX

On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 07:35:01PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 02:15:02PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Thu, 7 Feb 2013 16:57:42 -0500
> > Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...hat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi All,
> > > 
> > > We've hit a weird error in Fedora using the 3.8-rcX kernels.  It seems
> > > the mock tool is getting back ENOMEM when doing very simple things that
> > > normally just work.  The 3.7 kernels on the same userspace work just
> > > fine.  It seems just running 'mock init -v' is enough to cause the
> > > failure.
> > 
> > I assume you're not seeing the "page allocation failure" message and
> > backtrace.  This means that either
> 
> Right.  If I disable our debug options, I see no backtraces at all and
> the python app still gets ENOMEM returned.  (See below for those
> interested).
> 
> > a) it's a __GFP_NOWARN callsite.  This is rare.  Or
> > 
> > b) it's actually a different error but someone went and overwrote a
> >    callee's return value with -ENOMEM.  We do this a lot and it sucks.
> 
> We do it in copy_io :\.
> 
> > > At first glance it seems copy_io is failing (possibly because
> > > get_task_io_context fails), and then the above fallout is printed.  The
> > > warning seems fairly valid, but I don't think that is the root of the
> > > problem.
> > 
> > yes, get_task_io_context() might be the place.  Tried adding a few
> > error-path printks in there to see what's happening?
> 
> Yeah, that's my next step.  I guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow.
> 
> > I can't see anything around there which leaves interrupts disabled
> > though.  It's quite likely that there's some code with is forgetting to
> > reenable interrupts on a rarely-tested error path, and that ENOMEM is
> > tickling the bug.
> 
> Right, agreed.  As I said, I think that is mostly a secondary issue.
> Hopefully it will be easy to fix once we figure out why we're getting
> the ENOMEM error.
> 
> Python backtrace below.  Seems to be failing on forking a umount command
> after init'ing the chroot.  I can put the full output somewhere if
> people are interested.

OK.  I've bisected this down to:

50804fe3737ca6a5942fdc2057a18a8141d00141 is the first bad commit
commit 50804fe3737ca6a5942fdc2057a18a8141d00141
Author: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 2 15:41:50 2010 -0800

    pidns: Support unsharing the pid namespace.
    

I haven't really gotten much farther than that yet, but the bisect was
pretty straight forward.  Eric, is there anything specific I can gather
or do to help figure out why that is causing mock to get such a weird
error?  I can provide the bisect log if you'd like.

josh
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