I've spent quite a while hunting that crap down; reverting VFS fix mentioned in original thread *does* get rid of the symptoms, but so does the patch below. What happens is this: if ->follow_link() (usually something like stat("/proc/2/fd", ...) done by pidof(8)) return ERR_PTR(-....), we return to __do_follow_link() and do the following: *p = dentry->d_inode->i_op->follow_link(dentry, nd); error = PTR_ERR(*p); if (!IS_ERR(*p)) { char *s = nd_get_link(nd); error = 0; if (s) error = __vfs_follow_link(nd, s); else if (nd->last_type == LAST_BIND) { error = force_reval_path(&nd->path, nd); if (error) path_put(&nd->path); } } return error; We _should_ return non-zero value; IS_ERR(ERR_PTR(-n)) is 1 and PTR_ERR(ERR_PTR(n)) is -n. What happens instead is that this thing actually returns 0. And no, it's not a miscompile. Patch below removes the symptoms of the bug, but only if both parts are present. I.e. *not* doing "report = 1" in proc_pid_follow_link() gives us visible breakage, despite the fact that report is initialized as 1 and nothing except proc_pid_follow_link() ever tries to assign anything to it. Seeing that fs/namei.c and fs/proc/base.c are compiled separately, we can exclude gcc problems. The cheapest way to reproduce is to boot with init=/bin/sh, then mount /proc and have stat("/proc/2/exe", &st) called; if stat() returns 0, we are fscked. The critical part is between return from proc_exe_link() (we'll leave it via if (!mm) return -ENOENT;) to return from __do_follow_link() -> do_follow_link() -> link_path_walk(). If somebody familiar with aranym guts are up to debugging that, more power to them. If I would've seen it on real hardware, I'd suspect something weird going on with caches, but... FWIW, it's observable on amd64 host; I haven't tried it on x86. Version of aranym is 0.9.6beta2-1 (one in lenny). Have fun... Patch [*NOT* for inclusion into mainline, obviously] follows: diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c index 24896e8..da5bb7f 100644 --- a/fs/namei.c +++ b/fs/namei.c @@ -524,6 +524,8 @@ static inline void path_to_nameidata(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd) nd->path.dentry = path->dentry; } +int report = 1; + static __always_inline int __do_follow_link(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd, void **p) { @@ -552,6 +554,8 @@ __do_follow_link(struct path *path, struct nameidata *nd, void **p) path_put(&nd->path); } } + if (report && !error && IS_ERR(*p)) + printk("fucked: %d %p\n", error, *p); return error; } diff --git a/fs/proc/base.c b/fs/proc/base.c index a1c43e7..24579de 100644 --- a/fs/proc/base.c +++ b/fs/proc/base.c @@ -1513,6 +1513,7 @@ static void *proc_pid_follow_link(struct dentry *dentry, struct nameidata *nd) goto out; error = PROC_I(inode)->op.proc_get_link(inode, &nd->path); + {extern int report; report = 1;} out: return ERR_PTR(error); } -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-m68k" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html