289a1e995e
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>