[BusyBox] Freeing memory from a signal handler in init?

[Rob Landley]

Okay, let's go over init/init.c:

ctrlaltdel_signal() is called as a signal handler, and it calls run_actions().  
The CTRLALTDEL action is one of the ones that gets filtered as an automatic 
run once, so after calling waitfor(action), it calls crappy_delete_function 
(which I have a patch to remove and save 38 bytes while simplifying the code, 
by the way, I just need to test it a bit first...)  and of course in 
delete_init_action it frees the action structure.  From signal context.

Now I remember from linux-kernel that you can't malloc from signal context 
because there's some weird lock in gcc that goes "boing" and it's a deadlock.  
I'd presume free has the lock over the same structures, leading to the same 
deadlock.

This probably has never been noticed before because the system is in the 
process of rebooting, so who's going to notice a hang in init when it's 
already forked off the process that does the reboot?  but if somebody ever 
redefines the CTRLALTDEL action to do a software suspend or something similar 
(or just plain anything other than shutdown/reboot the system), it could 
result in init not coming back.

Opinions?

Rob
-- 
www.linucon.org: Linux Expo and Science Fiction Convention
October 8-10, 2004 in Austin Texas.  (I'm the con chair.)