[PATCH] Fix for the PPTP hangs that have been reported

People have been reporting that PPP connections over ptys, such as
used with PPTP, will hang randomly when transferring large amounts of
data, for instance in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6530.
I have managed to reproduce the problem, and the patch below fixes the
actual cause.

The problem is not in fact in ppp_async.c but in n_tty.c.  What
happens is that when pptp reads from the pty, we call read_chan() in
drivers/char/n_tty.c on the master side of the pty.  That copies all
the characters out of its buffer to userspace and then calls
check_unthrottle(), which calls the pty unthrottle routine, which
calls tty_wakeup on the slave side, which calls ppp_asynctty_wakeup,
which calls tasklet_schedule.  So far so good.  Since we are in
process context, the tasklet runs immediately and calls
ppp_async_process(), which calls ppp_async_push, which calls the
tty->driver->write function to send some more output.

However, tty->driver->write() returns zero, because the master
tty->receive_room is still zero.  We haven't returned from
check_unthrottle() yet, and read_chan() only updates tty->receive_room
_after_ calling check_unthrottle.  That means that the driver->write
call in ppp_async_process() returns 0.  That would be fine if we were
going to get a subsequent wakeup call, but we aren't (we just had it,
and the buffer is now empty).

The solution is for n_tty.c to update tty->receive_room _before_
calling the driver unthrottle routine.  The patch below does this.
With this patch I was able to transfer a 900MB file over a PPTP
connection (taking about 25 minutes), whereas without the patch the
connection would always stall in under a minute.

Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

diff --git a/drivers/char/n_tty.c b/drivers/char/n_tty.c
index ede365d..b9371d5 100644 (file)
--- a/drivers/char/n_tty.c
+++ b/drivers/char/n_tty.c
@@ -1384,8 +1384,10 @@ do_it_again:
                 * longer than TTY_THRESHOLD_UNTHROTTLE in canonical mode,
                 * we won't get any more characters.
                 */
-               if (n_tty_chars_in_buffer(tty) <= TTY_THRESHOLD_UNTHROTTLE)
+               if (n_tty_chars_in_buffer(tty) <= TTY_THRESHOLD_UNTHROTTLE) {
+                       n_tty_set_room(tty);
                        check_unthrottle(tty);
+               }
 
                if (b - buf >= minimum)
                        break;