On 06/22, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Oleg, what do you think? Would it be reasonable to free the stack and > thread_info synchronously at exit time, clear the pointer (to catch > any odd use), and only RCU-delay the task_struct itself? I didn't see the patches yet, quite possibly I misunderstood... But no, I don't this we can do this (if we are not going to move ti->flags to task_struct at least). > (Obviously, we can't release it in do_exit() itself like we do some of > the other state - it would need to be released after we've scheduled > away to another process' stack, but we already have that TASK_DEAD > handling in finish_task_switch for this exact reason). Yes, but the problem is that a zombie thread can do its last schedule before it is reaped. Just for example, syscall_regfunc() does read_lock(&tasklist_lock); for_each_process_thread(p, t) { set_tsk_thread_flag(t, TIF_SYSCALL_TRACEPOINT); } read_unlock(&tasklist_lock); and this can easily hit a TASK_DEAD thread with ->stack == NULL. And we can't free/nullify it when the parent/debuger reaps a zombie, say, mark_oom_victim() expects that get_task_struct() protects thread_info as well. Oleg. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html