On 29.07.19 10:50, David Laight wrote:
Doesn't unmasking the signals and using send_sig() instead of force_sig() have the (probably unwanted) side effect of allowing userspace to send the signal?
I have ran some tests, and it does look like it is now possible to send signals to the DRBD kthread from userspace. However, ...
I've certainly got some driver code that uses force_sig() on a kthread that it doesn't (ever) want userspace to signal.
... we don't feel that it is absolutely necessary for userspace to be unable to send a signal to our kthreads. This is because the DRBD thread independently checks its own state, and (for example) only exits as a result of a signal if its thread state was already "EXITING" to begin with.
As such, our priority here is to get the main issue -- DRBD hanging upon exit -- resolved. I agree that it is not exactly desirable to have userspace send random signals to kthreads; not for DRBD and certainly not in general. However, we feel like it is more important to have DRBD actually work again in 5.3.
That said, there should probably still be a way to be able to send a signal to a kthread from the kernel, but not from userspace. I think the author of the original patch (Eric) might have some ideas here.
Jens, could you take a look and decide whether or not it's appropriate for you to funnel this through the linux-block tree to Linus for rc4?
The origina1 commit says:
Further force_sig is for delivering synchronous signals (aka exceptions). The locking in force_sig is not prepared to deal with running processes, as tsk->sighand may change during exec for a running process.
I think a lot of code has assumed that the only real difference between send_sig() and force_sig() is that the latter ignores the signal mask.
If you need to unblock a kernel thread (eg one blocked in kernel_accept()) in order to unload a driver, then you really don't want it to be possible for anything else to signal the kthread.
David
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