linux-kernel - Re: [0/3] 2.6.27.52 stable review

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Date:	Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:51:56 -0700
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Greg KH <gregkh@...e.de>
Cc:	Grant Coady <gcoady.lk@...il.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	stable@...nel.org, stable-review@...nel.org,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk
Subject: Re: [0/3] 2.6.27.52 stable review

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@...e.de> wrote:
>
> That's a warning that current->mm is null.  I don't know enough about
> the mm subsystem to say if this is normal or not, and I don't at first
> glance, see how this patch could have caused this to happen.

We call that whole "expand_stack()" through handle_mm_fault(), and
that's _not_ called just for the process itself. So "current->mm" is
sometimes simply the wrong thing to use - like when you access the VM
of another process (during fork for the argument setup of the new VM,
or during ptrace etc).

Which is why I think commit 05fa199d45c should fix it. It makes the
stack expansion thing use the right mm. Which it just _happened_ to do
before, because it was always called just from the faulting code where
current->mm happened to be the right mm.

But I really don't know if there might be other issues lurking too.

                        Linus
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