On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 4:12 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I wonder if we couldn't make something much cheaper, since we don't > actually care about it being globally incrementing, we just care about > it being globally unique. Actually, we don't even need it to be "globally unique" afaik. It really needs to be "relatively unique", since it's always compared within the confines of a particular task. So the problem with using the existing "self_exec_id" is that it's trivially the same across tasks. But a *tuple* of <struct task_struct, thread-specific exec_id> doesn't have that issue, so as far as I can tell we could easily make *that* the unique ID. I wonder if the number part of exec_id would even have to be 64-bit. I think I can do about 10000 execves per second if I make the program a small static one - and that's on a fast CPU. And it's a per-thread counter, so you can't scale it with lots of CPU's. So it would take something like four days to wrap. Hmm.. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html