[PATCH} - There appears to be a minor race condition in sched.c

Piet Delaney
2009-03-26T03:00:57Z

Ingo, Peter:

There appears to be a minor race condition in sched.c where
you can get a division by zero. I suspect that it only shows
up when the kernel is compiled without optimization and the code
loads rq->nr_running from memory twice.

It's part of our SMP stabilization changes that I just posted to:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/piet/xtensa-2.6.27-smp.git

I mentioned it to Johannes the other day and he suggested passing it on to you ASAP.

-------------------------------- Begin kernel/sched.c --------------------------------
index 9a1ddb8..607ee38 100644
@@ -1388,9 +1388,11 @@ static int task_hot(struct task_struct *p, u64 now, struct sched_domain *sd);
static unsigned long cpu_avg_load_per_task(int cpu)
{
struct rq *rq = cpu_rq(cpu);
+ unsigned long nr_running = rq->nr_running;

- if (rq->nr_running)
- rq->avg_load_per_task = rq->load.weight / rq->nr_running;
+ /* Local copy of nr_running used to avoid a possible div by zero */
+ if (nr_running)
+ rq->avg_load_per_task = rq->load.weight / nr_running;

return rq->avg_load_per_task;
}
-------------------------------- End kernel/sched.c --------------------------------

-piet