On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 11:09:56PM +0300, Pavel Skripkin wrote: > > we will exit with -ENOMEM. So at the very least all callers of > > kthread_stop() also need to check for -ENOMEM as well as -EINTR --- > > or, be somehow sure that the thread function was successfully called > > and started. In this particular case, the ext4 mount code had just > > started the kmmpd thread, and then detected that something else had > > gone wrong, and failed the mount before the kmmpd thread ever had a > > chance to run. > > There is a small problem about -ENOMEM... What I'd suggest is that we simply move > exit_thread: > EXT4_SB(sb)->s_mmp_tsk = NULL; > kfree(data); > brelse(bh); > return retval; > } out of the thread function. That means hanging struct mmpd_data off the struct ext4_sb_info structure, and then adding a function like this to fs/ext4/mmp.c static void ext4_stop_mmpd(struct ext4_sb_info *sbi) { if (sbi->s_mmp_tsk) { kthread_stop(sbi->s_mmp_tsk); brelse(sbi->s_mmp_data->bh); kfree(sbi->s_mmp_data); sbi->s_mmp_data = NULL; sbi->s_mmp_tsk = NULL; } } Basically, just move all of the cleanup so it is done after the kthread is stopped, so we don't have to do any fancy error checking. We just do it unconditionally. - Ted P.S. Actually, we could drop the struct mmpd_data altogether, and just hang the buffer head as sbi->s_mmp_bh. Then we can just pass the struct super * as the private pointer to kmmpd().