On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 01:54:56PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:
On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 02:58:12PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
And I think our horrible "kernel threads return to user space when
done" is absolutely horrifically nasty. Maybe of the clever sort, but
mostly of the historical horror sort.
How would you prefer to handle that, then? Separate magical path from
kernel_execve() to switch to userland? We used to have something of
that sort, and that had been a real horror...
As it is, it's "kernel thread is spawned at the point similar to
ret_from_fork(), runs the payload (which almost never returns) and
then proceeds out to userland, same way fork(2) would've done."
That way kernel_execve() doesn't have to do anything magical.
Al, digging through the old notes and current call graph...
There's a large mess around do_exit() - we have a bunch of
callers all over arch/*; if nothing else, I very much doubt that really
want to let tracer play with a thread in the middle of die_if_kernel()
or similar.
We sure as hell do not want to arrange for anything on the kernel
stack in such situations, no matter what's done in exit(2)...
