Multi-thread corefiles broken since April

From: Steve Work
Date: Thu Dec 08 2005 - 02:16:28 EST


Coredumps from programs with more than one thread show garbage information for all threads except the primary. The problem was introduced with:

http://kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=5df240826c90afdc7956f55a004ea6b702df9203

on Apr 16 ("fix crash in entry.S restore_all") and is still present in current builds.

"kill -SEGV" this program and "info threads" the resulting corefile to see the problem:

#include <pthread.h>
static void* thread_sleep(void* x) { while (1) sleep(30); }
int main(int c, char** v) {
const static int tcount = 5;
pthread_t thr[tcount];
int i;
for (i=0; i<tcount; ++i)
pthread_create(&thr[i], NULL, thread_sleep, NULL);
while (1)
sleep(30);
return 0;
}

(gdb) info threads
7 process 18138 0x00000246 in ?? ()
6 process 18139 0x00000246 in ?? ()
5 process 18140 0x00000246 in ?? ()
4 process 18141 0x00000246 in ?? ()
3 process 18142 0x00000246 in ?? ()
2 process 18143 0x00000246 in ?? ()
* 1 process 18137 0xb7e69db6 in nanosleep () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
(gdb)

All these threads should show a legitimate location (the same spot in nanosleep) and do on kernels prior to the commit named above. (Notice one too many threads listed here also -- is this a related problem?)

Commenting out this line (in asm/i386/kernel/process.c:copy_thread) fixes the corefiles:

childregs = (struct pt_regs *) ((unsigned long) childregs - 8);

but presumably re-introduces the crash the original patch was intended to fix. Should this line be conditioned somehow? Or do the corefile write routines need to know about this adjusted offset?

Steve Work
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