Naveen, sorry for the terse and neglectful reply yesterday.
Actually, when I re-read the Linus's email, I think he already explained everything, so let me repeat: On 12/21, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Did you actually *see* the problem, or was this just from looking at the code? Yes. Because this code assumes that lock_task_sighand() must not fail. If it fails, we have a problem which should be fixed. > We have coredump serialization in exit_mm() that I think *should* make > this all ok - if we still see p->mm matching our mm, I don't think it > should be able to get to __exit_signal() and make the sighand go away, > so the lock_task_sighand() shouldn't ever fail. Yes, exactly. Note that if we ignore exec, we do not need lock_task_sighand() at all, we could simply do spin_lock_irq(p->sighand->siglock). The caller holds mm->mmap_sem for writing, if we see p->mm == mm it simply can not pass exit_mm() which does down_read(&mm->mmap_sem), so this task can not exit. The problem is, this task can change its ->sighand in de_thread(), that is why we need lock_task_sighand(). But if it does exec, it can't pass exec_mmap() by the same reason, we hold mmap_sem. > > if (p->mm) { > > if (unlikely(p->mm == mm)) { > > - lock_task_sighand(p, &flags); > > - nr += zap_process(p, exit_code); > > - unlock_task_sighand(p, &flags); > > + if (lock_task_sighand(p, &flags) { > > + nr += zap_process(p, > > exit_code); But we can't silently skip a process with the same ->mm. We can't even skip the execing thread task if it is going to change its ->mm, even if it is single-threaded. Note that exec_mmap() will notice mm->core_state and fail. So every task with the same mm should be accounted because it will play with core_state->nr_threads in exit_mm(). And it should be killed because otherwise coredump_wait() can sleep "forever". So this is not the right change in any case. If lock_task_sighand() can fail we should fix something else. Oleg. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/