Re: [PATCH] 2.4.18-rc2 Fix for get_pid hang

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

At some point in the past, Paul Larson wrote:
>> This was made against 2.4.18-rc2 but applies cleanly against
>> 2.4.18-rc4.  This is a fix for a problem where if we run out of
>> available pids, get_pid will hang the system while it searches
>> through the tasks for an available pid forever.

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 12:29:47AM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> Wouldn't it be a much cleaner patch to limit the maximum number of
> processes to less than the number of pids available. You seem to be
> fixing a non problem by adding branches to the innards of a loop.

I've seen this one before. It seems to kick in at 11K processes, where
one would normally expect it much higher... so I'm not sure a constant
upper bound on that counter suffices. Maybe clashes of pid's with pgrp's
and sessions and tgrps are what does that, maybe it's something else.

and of course:

#include <stdgeek.h>  /* Any hope of a non-O(tasks) solution? */


Cheers,
Bill