Re: Runaway cron task on 2.5.63/4 bk?

Linus Torvalds
2003-03-10T19:40:53Z

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, george anzinger wrote:
>
> Lets consider this one on its own merits. What SHOULD sleep do when
> asked to sleep for MAX_INT number of jiffies or more, i.e. when
> jiffies overflows? My notion, above, it that it is clearly an error.

My suggestion (in order of preference):
- sleep the max amount, and then restart as if a signal had happened
- sleep the max amount (old behaviour)
- consider it an error (new behaviour)

In this case the error case actually helped find the other unrelated bug,
so in this case the error actually _helped_ us. However, that was only
"help" from a kernel perspective, from a user perspective I definitely
think that it makes no sense to have "sleep(largenum)" return -EINVAL.

And in the end it's the user that matters.

Linus