Re: [PATCH] kthreads: kill CLONE_KERNEL, change kernel_thread(kernel_init) to avoid CLONE_SIGHAND

[Sasha Levin <sasha.levin@oracle.com>]

On 05/16/2014 11:35 AM, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> On 05/16, Sasha Levin wrote:
>>
>> On 04/13/2014 03:56 PM, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
>>> 1. Remove CLONE_KERNEL, it has no users and it is dangerous.
>>>
>>>    The (old) comment says "List of flags we want to share for kernel
>>>    threads" but this is not true, we do not want to share ->sighand by
>>>    default. This flag can only be used if the caller is sure that both
>>>    parent/child will never play with signals (say, allow_signal/etc).
>>>
>>> 2. Change rest_init() to clone kernel_init() without CLONE_SIGHAND.
>>>
>>>    In this case CLONE_SIGHAND does not really hurt, and it looks like
>>>    optimization because copy_sighand() can avoid kmem_cache_alloc().
>>>
>>>    But in fact this only adds the minor pessimization. kernel_init()
>>>    is going to exec the init process, and de_thread() will need to
>>>    unshare ->sighand and do kmem_cache_alloc(sighand_cachep) anyway,
>>>    but it needs to do more work and take tasklist_lock and siglock.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
>>
>> Hi Oleg,
>>
>> This patch triggers a hang during boot in my KVM guest.
> 
> Hmm... How??? ;)

I'm afraid this is just bisection gone bad. The real issue was the
new goldfish code added, and not this patch.

Since apparently the boot issue was probabilistic I ended up blaming
this commit by mistake. Sorry about that.


Thanks,
Sasha