Re: [RFC] ps command race fix

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 10:29:51 -0600
ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:

> So for systems that are going to be using a larger number of pid
> values I think we need a better data structure, and containers are
> likely to push us in that area.  Which means either an extensible
> hash table or radix tree look like the sane choices.

radix-trees are nice because you can efficiently traverse them in-order
while the contents are changing (albeit potentially missing newly-added
things, but that's inevitable).

radix-trees are not-nice because they allocate memory at insertion time. 
If that's a problem then rbtrees could perhaps be used.

idr-trees have similar characteristics to the radix-trees, except a) the
idr-tree find-next-above feature could perhaps be used for the core pid
allocation and b) idr-trees don't presently have suitable search functions
for performing the iteration.

At least we have plenty of choices ;)