The patch titled Subject: fork: report pid exhaustion correctly has been removed from the -mm tree. Its filename was fork-report-pid-exhaustion-correctly.patch This patch was dropped because it was merged into mainline or a subsystem tree ------------------------------------------------------ From: KJ Tsanaktsidis <ktsanaktsidis@xxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: fork: report pid exhaustion correctly Make the clone and fork syscalls return EAGAIN when the limit on the number of pids /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max is exceeded. Currently, when the pid_max limit is exceeded, the kernel will return ENOSPC from the fork and clone syscalls. This is contrary to the documented behaviour, which explicitly calls out the pid_max case as one where EAGAIN should be returned. It also leads to really confusing error messages in userspace programs which will complain about a lack of disk space when they fail to create processes/threads for this reason. This error is being returned because alloc_pid() uses the idr api to find a new pid; when there are none available, idr_alloc_cyclic() returns -ENOSPC, and this is being propagated back to userspace. This behaviour has been broken before, and was explicitly fixed in commit 35f71bc0a09a ("fork: report pid reservation failure properly"), so I think -EAGAIN is definitely the right thing to return in this case. The current behaviour change dates from commit 95846ecf9dac ("pid: replace pid bitmap implementation with IDR AIP") and was I believe unintentional. This patch has no impact on the case where allocating a pid fails because the child reaper for the namespace is dead; that case will still return -ENOMEM. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180903111016.46461-1-ktsanaktsidis@xxxxxxxxxxx Fixes: 95846ecf9dac ("pid: replace pid bitmap implementation with IDR AIP") Signed-off-by: KJ Tsanaktsidis <ktsanaktsidis@xxxxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> Cc: Gargi Sharma <gs051095@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- diff -puN kernel/pid.c~fork-report-pid-exhaustion-correctly kernel/pid.c --- a/kernel/pid.c~fork-report-pid-exhaustion-correctly +++ a/kernel/pid.c @@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ struct pid *alloc_pid(struct pid_namespa idr_preload_end(); if (nr < 0) { - retval = nr; + retval = (nr == -ENOSPC) ? -EAGAIN : nr; goto out_free; } _ Patches currently in -mm which might be from ktsanaktsidis@xxxxxxxxxxx are