Debian's ia64 autobuilders have been seeing kernel freeze or reboot
when running the gdb testsuite (Debian bug 588574): dannf bisected to
2.6.32 62eede62dafb4a6633eae7ffbeb34c60dba5e7b1 "mm: ZERO_PAGE without
PTE_SPECIAL"; and reproduced it with gdb's gcore on a simple target.
I'd missed updating the gate_vma handling in __get_user_pages(): that
happens to use vm_normal_page() (nowadays failing on the zero page),
yet reported success even when it failed to get a page - boom when
access_process_vm() tried to copy that to its intermediate buffer.
Fix this, resisting cleanups: in particular, leave it for now reporting
success when not asked to get any pages - very probably safe to change,
but let's not risk it without testing exposure.
Why did ia64 crash with 16kB pages, but succeed with 64kB pages?
Because setup_gate() pads each 64kB of its gate area with zero pages.
Reported-by: Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>
Bisected-by: dann frazier <dannf@debian.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Tested-by: dann frazier <dannf@dannf.org>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
de51257aa3