linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] signals: work around random wakeups in sigsuspend()

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Date:	Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:34:23 +0000
From:	Al Viro <viro@...IV.linux.org.uk>
To:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@...cle.com>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	mingo@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] signals: work around random wakeups in sigsuspend()

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 09:11:44AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > Out of curiousity - where did that stray wakeup come from?  PTRACE_KILL
> > used to trigger those, but that got fixed.  How does one trigger that
> > kind of bugs on the current kernels?
> 
> Its a regular TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE sleep, for those spurious wakeups are
> not a bug, they're pretty fundamentally allowed.

They are, which makes any code that doesn't expect them in such situations
buggy.

> See: lkml.kernel.org/r/CA+55aFwHkOo+YGWKYROmce1-H_uG3KfEUmCkJUerTj=ojY2H6Q@...l.gmail.com

I know.  The question is not whether the code must take them into account
(it must; it's a bug not to), it's what's a good way to trigger such bugs.
IOW, how to stress-test for such bugs?

PTRACE_KILL used to be a convenient way to arrange for a wakeup delivered
to victim engaged in something we want to stress; it doesn't do blind
wake_up_process() anymore, so that trick is gone.  Is there anything
similar?

Suppose I have a dodgy waitqueue code (pardon the redundancy) in some
filesystem.  I have some idea how to maneuver a process into such-and-such
part of that code; is there any convenient way to turn that into "... OK,
now let's add bombing it with stray wakeups"?