Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt (file_free_rcu+0x14)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 8:32 PM, Kyle Sanderson <kyle.leet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Not sure if the stack is crap or not, but this looks like an RCU crash?
>
> https://i.imgur.com/sBnNe1p.jpg

Hmm. Not the clearest picture, and the "Code:" line in particular is
missing the interesting part, but at a guess it's taking a fault in
put_cred(), which inlines to

        if (atomic_dec_and_test(&(cred)->usage))
                __put_cred(cred);

and I think it's that "cred" pointer that may be NULL, which makes
"&(cred)->usage" be a NULL pointer too, and you get a page fault when
it tries to decrement the usage count.

Now, it goes without saying that the cred pointer should never *be*
NULL on a filp that is on the RCU freeing list, because we always
initialize file->f_cred when we allocate a file to the current creds.

So there's something odd going on. Possibly entirely unrelated memory
corruption.

Nothing obvious stands out, I think we'd need to see more of a pattern
of the problem to see what is up.

                 Linus