On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> "notify_parent()" uses p->p_pptr without any locking. As far as I can
> tell, that is wrong. It looks like it should have a read-lock on the
> tasklist_lock in order to not be racy (perhaps the parent does an exit on
> another CPU at just this moment), but it gets slightly ugly because it is
> already called occasionally from contexts that already have it, and in
> other places from contexts that do _not_ have it.
>
> Is there some reason you can see why this isn't a bug? Fixing it looks
> simple, but either involves making all callers of "notify_parent()" get
> the tasklist lock, or by using a separate "already locked" version for the
> case where we have the lock before (ie "do_notify_parent()"). Issues?
FYI:
A few days ago somebody in a local list discovered the following message
in his syslog running 2.2.14 on a SMP machine:
kernel: eh? notify_parent with state 0?
It appears to me that tsk->state changed to TASK_RUNNING probably due to
a race. Although he did not observe any harmful impact on his system,
this might be the kind of bug you are talking about.
Martin
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 31 2000 - 21:00:25 EST