Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:37:23 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, earl_chew@agilent.com, oleg@redhat.com,
       alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, andi@firstfloor.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] exec: Make do_coredump more robust and safer when
 using pipes in core_pattern: recursive dump detection
Message-Id: <20090626123723.9b6f88c2.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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	<20090625163050.d6a71a13.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<20090626180222.GD7337@hmsreliant.think-freely.org>
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On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:02:22 -0400
Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com> wrote:

> 
> core_pattern: Change how we detect recursive dumps with core_pattern pipes
> 
> Change how we detect recursive dumps.  Currently we have a mechanism by which
> we try to compare pathnames of the crashing process to the core_pattern path.
> This is broken for a dozen reasons, and just doesn't work in any sort of robust
> way.  I'm replacing it with the use of a 0 RLIMIT_CORE value.  Since helper
> apps set RLIMIT_CORE to zero, we don't write out core files for any process with
> that particular limit set.  It the core_pattern is a pipe, any non-zero limit is
> translated to RLIM_INFINITY.  This allows complete dumps to be captured, but
> prevents infinite recursion in the event that the core_pattern process itself
> crashes.
> 

The patch appears to be against 2.6.30 or something.  I get rejects due
to some other patch in exec.c which was added three weeks ago.  Please
don't do that :(

> 
> 
> exec.c |   32 +++++++++++++++++++-------------
> 1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/fs/exec.c b/fs/exec.c
> index ebe359f..163cfa7 100644
> --- a/fs/exec.c
> +++ b/fs/exec.c
> @@ -1802,22 +1802,28 @@ int do_coredump(long signr, int exit_code, struct pt_regs * regs)
>  		goto fail_unlock;
>  
>   	if (ispipe) {
> -		helper_argv = argv_split(GFP_KERNEL, corename+1, &helper_argc);
> -		/* Terminate the string before the first option */
> -		delimit = strchr(corename, ' ');
> -		if (delimit)
> -			*delimit = '\0';
> -		delimit = strrchr(helper_argv[0], '/');
> -		if (delimit)
> -			delimit++;
> -		else
> -			delimit = helper_argv[0];
> -		if (!strcmp(delimit, current->comm)) {
> -			printk(KERN_NOTICE "Recursive core dump detected, "
> -					"aborting\n");
> +		if (core_limit == 0) {
> +			 /*
> +			 * Normally core limits are irrelevant to pipes, since
> +			 * we're not writing to the file system, but we use
> +			 * core_limit of 0 here as a speacial value. Any
> +			 * non-zero limit gets set to RLIM_INFINITY below, but
> +			 * a limit of 0 skips the dump.  This is a consistent
> +			 * way to catch recursive crashes.  We can still crash
> +			 * if the core_pattern binary sets RLIM_CORE =  !0
> +			 * but it runs as root, and can do lots of stupid things
> +			 * Note that we use task_tgid_vnr here to grab the pid of the
> +			 * process group leader.  That way we get the right pid if a thread
> +			 * in a multi-threaded core_pattern process dies.
> +			 */
> +			printk(KERN_WARNING "Process %d(%s) has RLIMIT_CORE set to 0\n",
> +			       task_tgid_vnr(current), current->comm);
> +			printk(KERN_WARNING "Aborting core\n");
>  			goto fail_unlock;
>  		}

A few cosmetic things:

- The asterisks don't line up in the comment block.  Normally we'll do

	/*
	 *
	 *

  rather than

	/*
	*
	*

- The comment overflows 80 columns and makes a mess.

- Would it not be neater to do this check in a separate function? 
  Then the comment block can go above the function rather than being
  all scrunched to the right and do_coredump() (which is already >150
  lines) just gets

	if (ispipe) {
+		if (core_limit_is_zero())
+			goto fail_unlock;
--
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