Re: [RFC PATCH v3] audit: move the tree pruning to a dedicated thread

From: "Palik, Imre" <imrep(a)amazon.de&gt; When file auditing is enabled, during a low memory situation, a memory allocation with __GFP_FS can lead to pruning the inode cache. Which can, in turn lead to audit_tree_freeing_mark() being called. This can call audit_schedule_prune(), that tries to fork a pruning thread, and waits until the thread is created. But forking needs memory, and the memory allocations there are done with __GFP_FS. So we are waiting merrily for some __GFP_FS memory allocations to complete, while holding some filesystem locks. This can take a while ... This patch creates a single thread for pruning the tree from audit_add_tree_rule(), and thus avoids the deadlock that the on-demand thread creation can cause. Reported-by: Matt Wilson <msw(a)amazon.com&gt; Cc: Matt Wilson <msw(a)amazon.com&gt; Signed-off-by: Imre Palik <imrep(a)amazon.de&gt;

diff --git a/kernel/audit_tree.c b/kernel/audit_tree.c index 2e0c974..4883b6e 100644 --- a/kernel/audit_tree.c +++ b/kernel/audit_tree.c @@ -37,6 +37,7 @@ struct audit_chunk { static LIST_HEAD(tree_list); static LIST_HEAD(prune_list); +static struct task_struct *prune_thread; /* * One struct chunk is attached to each inode of interest. @@ -651,6 +652,55 @@ static int tag_mount(struct vfsmount *mnt, void *arg) return tag_chunk(mnt->mnt_root->d_inode, arg); } +/* + * That gets run when evict_chunk() ends up needing to kill audit_tree. + * Runs from a separate thread. + */ +static int prune_tree_thread(void *unused) +{ + for (;;) { + set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE); + if (list_empty(&prune_list)) + schedule(); + __set_current_state(TASK_RUNNING); + + mutex_lock(&audit_cmd_mutex); + mutex_lock(&audit_filter_mutex); + + while (!list_empty(&prune_list)) { + struct audit_tree *victim; + + victim = list_entry(prune_list.next, + struct audit_tree, list); + list_del_init(&victim->list); + + mutex_unlock(&audit_filter_mutex); + + prune_one(victim); + + mutex_lock(&audit_filter_mutex); + } + + mutex_unlock(&audit_filter_mutex); + mutex_unlock(&audit_cmd_mutex); + } + return 0; +} + +static int launch_prune_thread(void) +{ + prune_thread = kthread_create(prune_tree_thread, NULL, + "audit_prune_tree"); + if (IS_ERR(prune_thread)) { + pr_err("cannot start thread audit_prune_tree"); + prune_thread = NULL; + return -ENOMEM; + } else { + wake_up_process(prune_thread); + return 0; + } +}