Re: [PATCH] Fix a race in pid generation that causes pids to be reused immediately.

Linus Torvalds
2010-06-09T22:28:28Z

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Quite possibly. I'd worry about the overflow case a bit, but it's
> certainly going to get the right value when base << MAX_INT.

Having given it a couple of seconds more thought, I don't think there is
an overflow case either. All of a/b/base are guaranteed to be non-negative
(or our pid code is in worse trouble anyway), so there is no overflow
possible. So yes. Just comparing a-base < b-base should always be safe.

Linus