For ptrace_stop to work on PREEMT_RT no spinlocks can be taken once ptrace_freeze_traced has completed successfully. Which fundamentally means the lock dance of dropping siglock and grabbing tasklist_lock does not work on PREEMPT_RT. So I have worked through what is necessary so that tasklist_lock does not need to be grabbed in ptrace_stop after siglock is dropped. I have explored several alternate ways of getting there and along the way I found a lot of small bug fixes/cleanups that don't necessarily contribute to the final result but that or worthwhile on their own. So I have included those changes in this set of changes just so they don't get lost. In addition I had a conversation with Thomas Gleixner recently that emphasized for me the need to reduce the hold times of tasklist_lock, and that made me realize that in principle it is possible. https://lkml.kernel.org/r/87mtfmhap2.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Which is a long way of saying that not taking tasklist_lock in ptrace_stop is good not just for PREMPT_RT but also for improving the scalability of the kernel in general. After this set of changes only cgroup_enter_frozen should remain a stumbling block for PREEMPT_RT in the ptrace_stop path. Eric W. Biederman (16): signal/alpha: Remove unused definition of TASK_REAL_PARENT signal/ia64: Remove unused definition of IA64_TASK_REAL_PARENT_OFFSET kdb: Use real_parent when displaying a list of processes powerpc/xmon: Use real_parent when displaying a list of processes ptrace: Remove dead code from __ptrace_detach ptrace: Remove unnecessary locking in ptrace_(get|set)siginfo signal: Wake up the designated parent ptrace: Only populate last_siginfo from ptrace ptrace: In ptrace_setsiginfo deal with invalid si_signo ptrace: In ptrace_signal look at what the debugger did with siginfo ptrace: Use si_sino as the signal number to resume with ptrace: Stop protecting ptrace_set_signr with tasklist_lock ptrace: Document why ptrace_setoptions does not need a lock signal: Protect parent child relationships by childs siglock ptrace: Use siglock instead of tasklist_lock in ptrace_check_attach signal: Always call do_notify_parent_cldstop with siglock held arch/alpha/kernel/asm-offsets.c | 1 - arch/ia64/kernel/asm-offsets.c | 1 - arch/powerpc/xmon/xmon.c | 2 +- kernel/debug/kdb/kdb_main.c | 2 +- kernel/exit.c | 23 +++- kernel/fork.c | 12 +- kernel/ptrace.c | 132 ++++++++---------- kernel/signal.c | 296 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------- 8 files changed, 279 insertions(+), 190 deletions(-) Eric