fork: report pid exhaustion correctly

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 f8cf9f38ee1d ("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 e6f735160050 ("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/20180903111016.46461-1-ktsanaktsidis@zendesk.com
Fixes: e6f735160050 ("pid: replace pid bitmap implementation with IDR AIP")
Signed-off-by: KJ Tsanaktsidis <ktsanaktsidis@zendesk.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Gargi Sharma <gs051095@gmail.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

diff --git a/kernel/pid.c b/kernel/pid.c
index de1cfc4f75a2eb8df16e3d1018122226a1a30f14..cdf63e53a01425182d66f1c8883a249cedbaaa88 100644 (file)
--- a/kernel/pid.c
+++ b/kernel/pid.c
@@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ struct pid *alloc_pid(struct pid_namespace *ns)
                idr_preload_end();
 
                if (nr < 0) {
-                       retval = nr;
+                       retval = (nr == -ENOSPC) ? -EAGAIN : nr;
                        goto out_free;
                }