Re: [GIT PULL] signal/exit/ptrace changes for v5.17

[Eric W. Biederman]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 6:08 AM Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> People sometimes think that is just a "poll/select()" thing, but
>> that's not at all true. It's quite valid to do things like
>>
>>         add_wait_queue(..)
>>         for (.. some loop ..) {
>>                 set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE);
>>                 ... do various things, checking state etc ..
>>                schedule();
>>         }
>>         set_current_state(TASK_RUNNABLE);
>>         remove_wait_queue();
>
> Of course, in most modern cases, the above sequence is actually
> encoded as a "wait_event_interruptible()", because we don't generally
> want to open-code the whole thing.

Yes.

What I was looking at that inspired the question is that
"wake_up" ultimately expands to "try_to_wake_up(task, TASK_NORMAL, 0)".

Whereas "wake_up_interruptible" expands to
"try_to_wake_up(task, TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE, 0)".

With the practical challenge that if I want to change
wait_event_interruptible to wait_event_killable I need to change all of
the wakers.

> But the actual end result still ends up being exactly the same, it's
> just syntactically denser and more legible version of the above thing,
> and you can still have the "event" you wait on have nested waiting
> situations.
>
> The nested waiting is by no means common. The only _common_situation
> where you're on multiple wait queues tends to be select/poll kind of
> things, when they aren't really nested as much as iterated over, but
> conceptually the nested case is still quite important, and it allows
> you to do things that a traditional "wait_on()" interface with just
> one single wait-queue just doesn't allow for.

I think it may just be the part of the kernel where I usually work.
Changing wait_event_interruptible to wait_event_killable has always just
worked for me, but it doesn't in the pipe code.

It doesn't because of wake_up_interruptible.

I do know that short-term-disk-sleep aka task_uninterruptible is special
to performing things like disk I/O, and really short term things.

It might just be the names but I look at wake_up_interruptible and my
klaxon's go off in my head saying something doesn't make sense.  So I
will read up and look at those nested wait-queue scenarios and see if I
can find the piece of understanding I am missing.

Eric