Re: [PATCH 1/2] break out page allocation warning code

[john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>]

On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 16:51 -0700, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Apr 2011, john stultz wrote:
> > In the meantime, I'll put some effort into trying to protect unlocked
> > current->comm acccess using get_task_comm() where possible. Won't happen
> > in a day, and help would be appreciated. 
> > 
> 
> We need to stop protecting ->comm with ->alloc_lock since it is used for 
> other members of task_struct that may or may not be held in a function 
> that wants to read ->comm.  We should probably introduce a seqlock.

Agreed. My initial approach is to consolidate accesses to use
get_task_comm(), with special case to skip the locking if tsk==current,
as well as a lock free __get_task_comm() for cases where its not current
being accessed and the task locking is already done.

Once that's all done, the next step is to switch to a seqlock (or
possibly RCU if Dave is still playing with that idea), internally in the
get_task_comm implementation and then yank the special __get_task_comm. 

But other suggestions are welcome.

thanks
-john


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