2005/11/29, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>:
> > I found a race condition in procfs on SMP systems. The result is an
> > oops in processes like pidof. Apparently ->proc_read() gets passed a
> > potentially NULL pointer.
>
> Do you know what the race is?

Apparently it's a race between deleting a process and accessing its
/proc/pid entries. It came out in pidof while it was accessing
/proc/pid/stat (fs/proc/array.c:do_task_stat crashed on first
instruction - it was an inline function accessing task->state,
get_task_state IIRC). oops (with vserver history data - I'm using a
patch mentioned below) is attached.

>
> How does one reproduce it?

I managed to reproduce it (although not reliably) during high CPU load
and I/O (parallel kernel compiles) on SMP systems with the vserver
patch (http://linux-vserver.org, the exact patch is
http://vserver.13thfloor.at/Experimental/patch-2.6.14.2-vs2.1.0-rc8.diff),
but the vserver maintainer pointed out that it probably is a mainline
issue. We're not using 2.6 systems too much except for the vserver
test beds so I cannot tell if it happens on vanilla kernels.

>
> > The following micro-patch seems to fix it.
>
> It might be right, or it might be a workaround..
>

I'm not a kernel guru so it's just my proposal. Can it break anything?
An alternative _might_ be somewhat coarser task_struct locking
(do_task_stat grabs a spinlock but then it's already too late).
However, if no "right" solution appears, I'll keep using my two-liner
because it seems to help, at least in my setup.

Best regards,
 Grzegorz Nosek