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Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:34:13 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: <containers@lists.osdl.org>, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>,
       Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Andrew de Quincey <adq_dvb@lidskialf.net>,
       Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] dvb_en_50221: Convert to kthread API
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On Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:59:04 -0600
"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:

> This patch is a minimal transformation to use the kthread API
> doing it's best to preserve the existing logic.
> 
> Instead of starting kdvb-ca by calling kernel_thread,
> daemonize and sigfillset we kthread_run is used.
> 
> Instead of tracking the pid of the running thread we instead
> simply keep a flag to indicate that the current thread is
> running, as that is all the pid is really used for.
> 
> And finally the kill_proc sending signal 0 to the kernel thread to
> ensure it is alive before we wait for it to shutdown is removed.
> The kthread API does not provide the pid so we don't have that
> information readily available and the test is just silly.  If there
> is no shutdown race the test is a useless confirmation of that the
> thread is running.  If there is a race the test doesn't fix it and
> we should fix the race properly.

urgh, yes, this is just sad.  We should convert this driver fully to
the kthread API - it will end up much better.

I'll queue this up as a -mm-only thing as a gentle reminder that
we should do it properly.