Bug#787191: Bug#776192: Linux null-pointer deref in 3.16.7-ctk2-1 (was: Bug#776192: upgrade-reports wheezy to jessie boot problem)

[Faidon Liambotis]

Hi,

Any news about this? Can I help in any way?

Thanks,
Faidon

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 05:41:24PM +0300, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2015 at 08:50:58PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > It looks the same as this problem:
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1276705
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.devel.kernel.general/39123/
> 
> I just encountered this bug while trying to install jessie on a Dell
> PowerEdge R610 with a SAS 6/iR (fairly recent, much more than 1950s).
> The kernel crashes while in d-i and installation fails. I also tried
> with a nightly d-i with Linux 4.0 -- same issue.
> 
> Ironically, I found this bug report, clicked through the referenced
> links, only to discover I had previously investigated this when
> installling a similar server with Ubuntu 14.04 and I've even replied to
> the Launchpad bug above... I can confirm it's the exact same bug. Note
> that it was also covered by LWN(!): https://lwn.net/Articles/611226/
> 
> It's disappointing that this bug hasn't been fixed yet upstream and
> especially the part where mptsas' error handling is broken and the
> kernel crashes instead of gracefully failing. This is a different,
> secondary, bug that is just triggered by the timeout.
> 
> In any case, there seems to have been /some/ improvement upstream on
> this. systemd has increased the timeout from 30s to 60s (2e92633) and
> subsequently to 180s (b5338a1), in commits that are both included in
> v217. They have also made this a kernel command-line option
> (udev.event-timeout & rd.udev.event-timeout) but those are more invasive
> patches.
> 
> My working servers with Ubuntu 12.04 & 14.04 indicate on their dmesg
> that the probe time is somewhere between 18-31s, so 180s would
> definitely fix the effect of this bug.
> 
> The commits above aren't directly backportable to v215 as the upstream
> code has changed significantly but the very simple patch attached is the
> equivalent fix for v215 (it's untested, though).
> 
> This affects a large number of Dell systems (~100 alone in my case) and
> there is no practical workaround, so it'd be great if this was fixed in
> a jessie point release.
> 
> Best,
> Faidon

> diff --git a/src/udev/udevd.c b/src/udev/udevd.c
> index a45d324..072499c 100644
> --- a/src/udev/udevd.c
> +++ b/src/udev/udevd.c
> @@ -1415,7 +1415,7 @@ int main(int argc, char *argv[])
>                                  if (worker->state != WORKER_RUNNING)
>                                          continue;
>  
> -                                if ((now(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) - worker->event_start_usec) > 30 * USEC_PER_SEC) {
> +                                if ((now(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) - worker->event_start_usec) > 180 * USEC_PER_SEC) {
>                                          log_error("worker [%u] %s timeout; kill it", worker->pid,
>                                              worker->event ? worker->event->devpath : "<idle>");
>                                          kill(worker->pid, SIGKILL);