It was found that if a process has accumulated sufficient number of pending signals, the exiting of that process may cause its parent to have hard lockup when running on a debug kernel with a slow memory freeing path (like with KASAN enabled). release_task() => flush_sigqueue() The lockup condition can be reproduced on a large system with a lot of memory and relatively slow CPUs running LTP's sigqueue_9-1 test on a debug kernel. This patchset tries to mitigate this problem by introducing a new kernel memory freeing queue mechanism modelled after the wake_q mechanism for waking up tasks. Then flush_sigqueue() and release_task() are modified to use the freeing queue mechanism to defer the actual memory object freeing until after releasing the tasklist_lock and with irq re-enabled. With the patchset applied, the hard lockup problem was no longer reproducible on the debug kernel. Waiman Long (4): mm: Implement kmem objects freeing queue signal: Make flush_sigqueue() use free_q to release memory signal: Add free_uid_to_q() mm: Do periodic rescheduling when freeing objects in kmem_free_up_q() include/linux/sched/user.h | 3 +++ include/linux/signal.h | 4 ++- include/linux/slab.h | 28 +++++++++++++++++++++ kernel/exit.c | 12 ++++++--- kernel/signal.c | 29 +++++++++++++--------- kernel/user.c | 17 ++++++++++--- mm/slab_common.c | 50 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ security/selinux/hooks.c | 8 ++++-- 8 files changed, 128 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-) -- 2.18.1