After upgrading to vanilla kernel 2.6.31-rc8, my Ubuntu Karmic userspace cannot complete the boot sequence.


It gets to about this point in the sequence:


 * Starting kernel event manager...
[   17.416876] udev: starting version 146
 * Loading hardware drivers...
[   18.635354] i2c-adapter i2c-0: nForce2 SMBus adapter at 0x600
[   18.635475] i2c-adapter i2c-1: nForce2 SMBus adapter at 0x700
[   18.981817] sky2 eth0: enabling interface
[   18.983599] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
[   19.393425] ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LACI] enabled at IRQ 22
[   19.393502] Intel ICH 0000:00:0d.0: PCI INT A -> Link[LACI] -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22
[   19.393627] Intel ICH 0000:00:0d.0: setting latency timer to 64
[   19.706038] intel8x0_measure_ac97_clock: measured 50143 usecs (2464 samples)
[   19.706103] intel8x0: clocking to 46887
[   21.450250] sky2 eth0: Link is up at 1000 Mbps, full duplex, flow control both
[   21.452066] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready


At which point the boot process halts.  I am not sure if it is a userspace bug or a kernel bug.


Bisected to this commit:


commit 0db501bd0610ee0c0aca84d927f90bcccd09e2bd
Author: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Date:   Thu Aug 27 03:20:04 2009 -0700

    inotify: Ensure we alwasy write the terminating NULL.
    
    Before the rewrite copy_event_to_user always wrote a terqminating '\0'
    byte to user space after the filename.  Since the rewrite that
    terminating byte was skipped if your filename is exactly a multiple of
    event_size.  Ouch!
    
    So add one byte to name_size before we round up and use clear_user to
    set userspace to zero like /dev/zero does instead of copying the
    strange nul_inotify_event.  I can't quite convince myself len_to_zero
    will never exceed 16 and even if it doesn't clear_user should be more
    efficient and a more accurate reflection of what the code is trying to
    do.
    
    Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@aristanetworks.com>
    Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>