At that point nobody else has references to the victim files_struct; as the matter of fact, the caller will free it immediately after close_files() returns, with no RCU delays or anything of that sort. That's why we are not protecting against fdtable reallocation on expansion, not cleaning the bitmaps, etc. There's no point zeroing the pointers in ->fd[] either, let alone make that an atomic operation. Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- fs/file.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/file.c b/fs/file.c index 991860ee7848..8770010170c5 100644 --- a/fs/file.c +++ b/fs/file.c @@ -413,7 +413,7 @@ static struct fdtable *close_files(struct files_struct * files) set = fdt->open_fds[j++]; while (set) { if (set & 1) { - struct file * file = xchg(&fdt->fd[i], NULL); + struct file *file = fdt->fd[i]; if (file) { filp_close(file, files); cond_resched(); -- 2.39.5