Re: Status of reverted Linux patch "tty: Fix ldisc crash on reopened tty", Linux 4.9 kernel frequent crashes

[Mikulas Patocka]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2017, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 11:10:14PM +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > 
> > Recently Nathan March reported on centos-virt list he's getting frequent Linux kernel crashes with Linux 4.9 LTS kernel because of the missing patch "tty: Fix ldisc crash on reopened tty".
> 
> Crashes with "normal" operation, or crashes when running a fuzzer or
> other type of program?

I can crash it reliably (in a few tries), if I use an old Debian 5 
userspace on PA-RISC. The crash happens when I connect to the machine with 
ssh and type something to the terminal before the prompt appears.

Mikulas

> > The patch was already merged upstream here:
> > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=71472fa9c52b1da27663c275d416d8654b905f05
> > 
> > but then reverted here:
> > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=896d81fefe5d1919537db2c2150ab6384e4a6610
> > 
> > Nathan confirmed if he applies the patch from 71472fa9c52b1da27663c275d416d8654b905f05 to his Linux 4.9 LTS kernel the bug/problem goes away, so the patch (or similar fix) is still needed, at least for 4.9 LTS kernel.
> > 
> > 
> > Mikulas reported he's able to trigger the same crash on Linux 4.10:
> > https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2440637.html
> > https://lists.gt.net/linux/kernel/2664604?search_string=ldisc%20reopened;#2664604
> > 
> > Michael Neuling reported he's able to trigger the bug on PowerPC:
> > https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/3/10/1582
> > 
> > 
> > So now the question is.. is anyone currently working on getting this patch fixed and applied upstream? I think one of the problems earlier was being able to reliable reproduce the crash.. Nathan says he's able to reproduce it many times per week on his environment on x86_64.
> 
> I don't know of anyone working on it, want to do it yourself?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h
>