Hi Eric, On Wed, Dec 08, 2021 at 02:25:31PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Today the rules are a bit iffy and arbitrary about which kernel > threads have struct kthread present. Both idle threads and thread > started with create_kthread want struct kthread present so that is > effectively all kernel threads. Make the rule that if PF_KTHREAD > and the task is running then struct kthread is present. > > This will allow the kernel thread code to using tsk->exit_code > with different semantics from ordinary processes. > > To make ensure that struct kthread is present for all > kernel threads move it's allocation into copy_process. > > Add a deallocation of struct kthread in exec for processes > that were kernel threads. > > Move the allocation of struct kthread for the initial thread > earlier so that it is not repeated for each additional idle > thread. > > Move the initialization of struct kthread into set_kthread_struct > so that the structure is always and reliably initailized. > > Clear set_child_tid in free_kthread_struct to ensure the kthread > struct is reliably freed during exec. The function > free_kthread_struct does not need to clear vfork_done during exec as > exec_mm_release called from exec_mmap has already cleared vfork_done. > > Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> This patch as commit 40966e316f86 ("kthread: Ensure struct kthread is present for all kthreads") in -next causes an ARCH=arm multi_v5_defconfig kernel to fail to boot in QEMU. I had to apply commit 6692c98c7df5 ("fork: Stop protecting back_fork_cleanup_cgroup_lock with CONFIG_NUMA") to get it to build and I applied commit dd621ee0cf8e ("kthread: Warn about failed allocations for the init kthread") to avoid the known runtime warning. $ make -skj"$(nproc)" ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- distclean multi_v5_defconfig all $ qemu-system-arm \ -initrd rootfs.cpio \ -append earlycon \ -machine palmetto-bmc \ -no-reboot \ -dtb arch/arm/boot/dts/aspeed-bmc-opp-palmetto.dtb \ -display none \ -kernel arch/arm/boot/zImage \ -m 512m \ -nodefaults \ -serial mon:stdio qemu-system-arm: warning: nic ftgmac100.0 has no peer qemu-system-arm: warning: nic ftgmac100.1 has no peer Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0 Linux version 5.16.0-rc1-00016-g40966e316f86-dirty (nathan@archlinux-ax161) (arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc (Debian 10.2.1-6) 10.2.1 20210110, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.35.2) #1 PREEMPT Wed Dec 22 18:08:53 UTC 2021 CPU: ARM926EJ-S [41069265] revision 5 (ARMv5TEJ), cr=00093177 CPU: VIVT data cache, VIVT instruction cache OF: fdt: Machine model: Palmetto BMC earlycon: ns16550a0 at MMIO 0x1e784000 (options '') printk: bootconsole [ns16550a0] enabled Memory policy: Data cache writethrough cma: Reserved 16 MiB at 0x5b000000 Zone ranges: DMA [mem 0x0000000040000000-0x000000005edfffff] Normal empty HighMem [mem 0x000000005ee00000-0x000000005fffffff] Movable zone start for each node Early memory node ranges node 0: [mem 0x0000000040000000-0x000000005bffffff] node 0: [mem 0x000000005c000000-0x000000005dffffff] node 0: [mem 0x000000005e000000-0x000000005edfffff] node 0: [mem 0x000000005ee00000-0x000000005fffffff] Initmem setup node 0 [mem 0x0000000040000000-0x000000005fffffff] Built 1 zonelists, mobility grouping on. Total pages: 130084 Kernel command line: earlycon Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes, linear) Inode-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes, linear) mem auto-init: stack:off, heap alloc:off, heap free:off Memory: 433140K/524288K available (9628K kernel code, 2019K rwdata, 2368K rodata, 340K init, 661K bss, 74764K reserved, 16384K cma-reserved, 0K highmem) SLUB: HWalign=32, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=1, Nodes=1 rcu: Preemptible hierarchical RCU implementation. rcu: RCU event tracing is enabled. Trampoline variant of Tasks RCU enabled. rcu: RCU calculated value of scheduler-enlistment delay is 10 jiffies. NR_IRQS: 16, nr_irqs: 16, preallocated irqs: 16 i2c controller registered, irq 16 random: get_random_bytes called from start_kernel+0x408/0x624 with crng_init=0 clocksource: FTTMR010-TIMER2: mask: 0xffffffff max_cycles: 0xffffffff, max_idle_ns: 79635851949 ns sched_clock: 32 bits at 24MHz, resolution 41ns, wraps every 89478484971ns Switching to timer-based delay loop, resolution 41ns Console: colour dummy device 80x30 printk: console [tty0] enabled printk: bootconsole [ns16550a0] disabled After that, it just hangs. The rootfs is available at https://github.com/ClangBuiltLinux/boot-utils in the images/arm folder. If there is any more information that I can provide or changes to test, please let me know. Cheers, Nathan