cgroup, kthread: close race window where new kthreads can be migrated to non-root cgroups
Creation of a kthread goes through a couple interlocked stages between the kthread itself and its creator. Once the new kthread starts running, it initializes itself and wakes up the creator. The creator then can further configure the kthread and then let it start doing its job by waking it up. In this configuration-by-creator stage, the creator is the only one that can wake it up but the kthread is visible to userland. When altering the kthread's attributes from userland is allowed, this is fine; however, for cases where CPU affinity is critical, kthread_bind() is used to first disable affinity changes from userland and then set the affinity. This also prevents the kthread from being migrated into non-root cgroups as that can affect the CPU affinity and many other things. Unfortunately, the cgroup side of protection is racy. While the PF_NO_SETAFFINITY flag prevents further migrations, userland can win the race before the creator sets the flag with kthread_bind() and put the kthread in a non-root cgroup, which can lead to all sorts of problems including incorrect CPU affinity and starvation. This bug got triggered by userland which periodically tries to migrate all processes in the root cpuset cgroup to a non-root one. Per-cpu workqueue workers got caught while being created and ended up with incorrected CPU affinity breaking concurrency management and sometimes stalling workqueue execution. This patch adds task->no_cgroup_migration which disallows the task to be migrated by userland. kthreadd starts with the flag set making every child kthread start in the root cgroup with migration disallowed. The flag is cleared after the kthread finishes initialization by which time PF_NO_SETAFFINITY is set if the kthread should stay in the root cgroup. It'd be better to wait for the initialization instead of failing but I couldn't think of a way of implementing that without adding either a new PF flag, or sleeping and retrying from waiting side. Even if userland depends on changing cgroup membership of a kthread, it either has to be synchronized with kthread_create() or periodically repeat, so it's unlikely that this would break anything. v2: Switch to a simpler implementation using a new task_struct bit field suggested by Oleg. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Suggested-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Reported-and-debugged-by: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com> Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # v4.3+ (we can't close the race on < v4.3) Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
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