On Saturday, 12 May 2007 16:18, Oleg Nesterov wrote: > On 05/12, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > > > ... user space tasks that call deamonize() can also be frozen prematurely. > > We didn't take this possibility into consideration before, which was > > obviously > > wrong. > > No, no, sorry for the confusion. User space tasks never call deamonize(). > > Kernel threads call daemonize, because when we are doing kernel_thread() > on behalf of user-space task, the new kernel thread (child) shares its > ->mm with the caller (parent). So it is considered as "is_user_space()" > until it does daemonize().
Ah, I see. We spawn a kernel thread from a code path that belongs to a user space task and we need to call deamonize() to make it become a 'real' kernel thread. Still, this means that is_user_space() may return 'true' for this thread before it calls daemonize() and then the scenario described by me in the previous message may occur. It seems. > Definitely, is_user_space() should have another name. Well, I have no (better) idea ... > When a user space task exits, it does exit_mm() and becomes "a kernel thread" > from the freezer POV. In its current from, freezer can do nothing with this. > The exiting task won't call try_to_freeze() after that, so > try_to_freeze_tasks() > will wait until it dissapears (actually, until it calls exit_notify(), note > the ->exit_state check in freezeable()). > > I do not think we can improve things if exit_mm() clears TIF_FREEZING. I think we can avoid the above scenario (in which a kernel thread that has called daemonize() "too late" ends up with TIF_FREEZE set and goes to refrigerator() while we're freezing the user space). > We should clear TIF_FREEZING when we set PF_NOFREEZE, I think. This was > discussed before iirc, but I forgot the result. It's in freezer-fix-pf_nofreeze-vs-freezeable-race.patch (appended for convenience, white space may be broken). Greetings, Rafael --- --- a/include/linux/freezer.h~freezer-fix-pf_nofreeze-vs-freezeable-race +++ a/include/linux/freezer.h @@ -63,8 +63,10 @@ static inline int thaw_process(struct ta */ static inline void frozen_process(struct task_struct *p) { - p->flags |= PF_FROZEN; - wmb(); + if (!unlikely(p->flags & PF_NOFREEZE)) { + p->flags |= PF_FROZEN; + wmb(); + } clear_tsk_thread_flag(p, TIF_FREEZE); } - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/