GitLab

The current epoll code can be tickled to run basically indefinitely in
both loop detection path check (on ep_insert()), and in the wakeup paths.
The programs that tickle this behavior set up deeply linked networks of
epoll file descriptors that cause the epoll algorithms to traverse them
indefinitely.  A couple of these sample programs have been previously
posted in this thread: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/2/25/297.

To fix the loop detection path check algorithms, I simply keep track of
the epoll nodes that have been already visited.  Thus, the loop detection
becomes proportional to the number of epoll file descriptor and links.
This dramatically decreases the run-time of the loop check algorithm.  In
one diabolical case I tried it reduced the run-time from 15 mintues (all
in kernel time) to .3 seconds.

Fixing the wakeup paths could be done at wakeup time in a similar manner
by keeping track of nodes that have already been visited, but the
complexity is harder, since there can be multi...