On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 02:58:12PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > And I think our horrible "kernel threads return to user space when > done" is absolutely horrifically nasty. Maybe of the clever sort, but > mostly of the historical horror sort. How would you prefer to handle that, then? Separate magical path from kernel_execve() to switch to userland? We used to have something of that sort, and that had been a real horror... As it is, it's "kernel thread is spawned at the point similar to ret_from_fork(), runs the payload (which almost never returns) and then proceeds out to userland, same way fork(2) would've done." That way kernel_execve() doesn't have to do anything magical. Al, digging through the old notes and current call graph...