From: Alex Smith <alex.smith@xxxxxxxxxx> On 32-bit/O32, pt_regs has a padding area at the beginning into which the syscall arguments passed via the user stack are copied. 4 arguments totalling 16 bytes are copied to offset 16 bytes into this area, however the area is only 24 bytes long. This means the last 2 arguments overwrite pt_regs->regs[{0,1}]. If a syscall function returns an error, handle_sys stores the original syscall number in pt_regs->regs[0] for syscall restart. signal.c checks whether regs[0] is non-zero, if it is it will check whether the syscall return value is one of the ERESTART* codes to see if it must be restarted. Should a syscall be made that results in a non-zero value being copied off the user stack into regs[0], and then returns a positive (non-error) value that matches one of the ERESTART* error codes, this can be mistaken for requiring a syscall restart. While the possibility for this to occur has always existed, it is made much more likely to occur by commit 46e12c07b3b9 ("MIPS: O32 / 32-bit: Always copy 4 stack arguments."), since now every syscall will copy 4 arguments and overwrite regs[0], rather than just those with 7 or 8 arguments. Since that commit, booting Debian under a 32-bit MIPS kernel almost always results in a hang early in boot, due to a wait4 syscall returning a PID that matches one of the ERESTART* codes, which then causes an incorrect restart of the syscall. The problem is fixed by increasing the size of the padding area so that arguments copied off the stack will not overwrite pt_regs->regs[{0,1}]. Signed-off-by: Alex Smith <alex.smith@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> # v3.13+ --- Changes in v2: - Rebase on current upstream. - Split comment change into a separate commit. I've rebased this patch on top of current mips-for-linux-next. However, for it to be applied to stable it needs an additional change to the PT_PADSLOT* definitions in arch/mips/kernel/smtc-asm.S to account for the changed pt_regs offsets. This file no longer exists since SMTC has been dropped. I'm not sure what the correct way to deal with this is - can an alternate version of the patch be submitted for stable? --- arch/mips/include/asm/ptrace.h | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/arch/mips/include/asm/ptrace.h b/arch/mips/include/asm/ptrace.h index 7e6e682..c301fa9 100644 --- a/arch/mips/include/asm/ptrace.h +++ b/arch/mips/include/asm/ptrace.h @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ struct pt_regs { #ifdef CONFIG_32BIT /* Pad bytes for argument save space on the stack. */ - unsigned long pad0[6]; + unsigned long pad0[8]; #endif /* Saved main processor registers. */ -- 1.9.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html