Re: 2.6.18 -mm merge plans

Christoph Hellwig
2006-06-10T09:53:37Z

On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 06:25:51PM -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com):
> > If you want to help with the bare pid to struct pid conversion I
> > don't have any outstanding patches, and getting that done kills
> > some theoretical pid wrap around problems as well as laying the ground
> > work for a simple pidspace implementation.
> >
> > Eric
>
> Is this the sort of thing you are looking for? Is this worthwhile for
> kernel_threads, or only for userspace threads - i.e. do we expect kernel
> threads to live?
>
> If we do want to do this for kernel threads, then I assume that
> eventually we'll want to change kernel_thread() itself. I actually
> started to do that earlier, but of course that way every user would
> have to be changed in the same patch :)

>
> Subject: [PATCH] struct pid: convert ieee1394 to hold struct pid
>
> ieee1394 driver caches pid_t's for kernel threads. Switch to
> holding a reference to a struct pid. This prevents concern
> about the cached pid pointing to the wrong process after the
> kernel thread dies and pids wrap around.

NACK. please conver to the kthread_ API instead. A reference to a pid_t
in a driver should generally be treated as a bug, the few exception should
be discussed on lkml and commented verbosely.