linux-kernel - Re: BUG_ON() in workingset_node_shadows

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Date:   Wed, 5 Oct 2016 14:46:17 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>
Cc:     Willy Tarreau <w@....eu>,
        Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@...driver.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Antonio SJ Musumeci <trapexit@...wn.link>,
        Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        stable <stable@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: BUG_ON() in workingset_node_shadows_dec() triggers

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 2:14 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org> wrote:
> Now, it can be argued that killing the process part should be
> configurable and that the code should be written to handle a WARN and
> clean up and error out nicely. But I still want to retain the "kill
> the process immediately" behavior in some capacity.

If "some capacity" is "can't do user space accesses", we could easily
force a SIGKILL of the current process. It won't die immediately in
the kernel, but it won't be returning to user space either.

The problem with the immediate kill is that it can be in interrupt
context, or just holding arbitrary locks. And it's hard to even tell
dynamically (sometimes you can see it: with preemption enabled you can
tell "am I in a non-preempt area", for example, but it ends up
depending on config options).

And *if* we make BUG() actually do something sane (non-trapping), we
can easily make it be generic, not arch-specific. In fact, I'd
implement it by just adding a "handle_bug()" in kernel/panic.c...

             Linus