fork: report pid exhaustion correctly

f83606f5 · KJ Tsanaktsidis <[email protected]> · 2018-09-20 12:22:25 -07:00

Make the clone and fork syscalls return EAGAIN when the limit on the
number of pids /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max is exceeded.

Currently, when the pid_max limit is exceeded, the kernel will return
ENOSPC from the fork and clone syscalls.  This is contrary to the
documented behaviour, which explicitly calls out the pid_max case as one
where EAGAIN should be returned.  It also leads to really confusing error
messages in userspace programs which will complain about a lack of disk
space when they fail to create processes/threads for this reason.

This error is being returned because alloc_pid() uses the idr api to find
a new pid; when there are none available, idr_alloc_cyclic() returns
-ENOSPC, and this is being propagated back to userspace.

This behaviour has been broken before, and was explicitly fixed in
commit 35f71bc0a09a ("fork: report pid reservation failure properly"),
so I think -EAGAIN is definitely the right thing to return in this case.
The current behaviour change dates from commit 95846ecf9dac ("pid:
replace pid bitmap implementation with IDR AIP") and was I believe
unintentional.

This patch has no impact on the case where allocating a pid fails because
the child reaper for the namespace is dead; that case will still return
-ENOMEM.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Fixes: 95846ecf9dac ("pid: replace pid bitmap implementation with IDR AIP")
Signed-off-by: KJ Tsanaktsidis <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <[email protected]>
Cc: Gargi Sharma <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>

Commit

f83606f5eb007adc33bc8541ede00590f477bdeb

Parents

ae596de1

Changes

1 files changed · +1 −1