Re: RFC [patch 00/34] PID Virtualization Overview

[Hubertus Franke <frankeh@watson.ibm.com>]

Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com):
> 
>>Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> writes:
>>
>>
>>>On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 22:54 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Mer, 2006-01-18 at 11:38 -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>But, it seems that many drivers like to print out pids as a unique
>>>>>identifier for the task.  Should we just let them print those
>>>>>potentially non-unique identifiers, deprecate and kill them, or provide
>>>>>a replacement with something else which is truly unique?
>>>>
>>>>Pick a format for container number + pid and document/stick with it -
>>>>something like container::pid (eg 0::114) or 114[0] whatever so long as
>>>>it is consistent
>>>
>>>having a pid_to_string(<task struct>) or maybe task_to_string() thing
>>>for convenient printing of pids/tasks.. I'm all for that. Means you can
>>>even configure how verbose you want it to be (include ->comm or not,
>>>->state maybe etc)
>>
>>The only way I can see to sanely do this is to pass it the temporary
>>buffer it writes it's contents into.
>>Something like:
>>printk(KERN_XXX "%s\n", task_to_string(buf, tsk)); ?
> 
> 
> That's kind of neat :)
> 
> The only other thing I can think of is to do something like
> 
> #define task_str(tsk) tsk->container_id, tsk->pid
> or
> #define task_str(tsk) tsk->container_id, ":", tsk->pid
> 
> and have it be used as
> 
> printk(KERN_XXX "%s::%s\n", task_str(tsk));
> or
> printk(KERN_XXX "%s%s%s\n", task_str(tsk));
> 
> The only reason I point it out is that we don't risk memory corruption
> if the printk caller forgets to give the extra '%s's, like we do if
> the caller forgets they need char buf[PID_CONTAINER_MAXLENGTH] instead
> of 'char *buf;' or 'char buf;'.
> 
> -serge
> 

As odd as this looks .. it does have the benefits and anything that avoids
potential problems.

On the other hand you might run into problems with the following.

		char *str = task_str(tsk);

Eitherway .. I don't think these are the big fish to fry now :-)

-- Hubertus