On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 08:01:41PM +1000, NeilBrown wrote: > On Tue, 11 Jul 2023, Chuck Lever III wrote: > > > On Jul 10, 2023, at 6:18 PM, NeilBrown <neilb@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > What do you think of removing the ability to stop an nfsd thread by > > > sending it a signal. Note that this doesn't apply to lockd or to nfsv4 > > > callback threads. And nfs-utils never relies on this. > > > I'm keen. It would make this patch a lot simpler. > > > > I agree the code base would be cleaner for it. > > > > But I'm the new kid. I'm not really sure if this is > > part of a kernel - user space API that we mustn't > > alter, or whether it's something that was added but > > never used, or .... > > > > I can sniff around to get a better understanding. > > Once upon a time it was the only way to kill the threads. > There was a syscall which let you start some threads. You couldn't > change the number of threads, but you could kill them. > And shutdown always kills processes, so letting nfsd threads be killed > meant that would be removed at system shutdown. > > When I added the ability to dynamically change the number of threads it > made sense that we could set the number to zero, and then to use that > functionality to shut down the nfs server. So the /etc/init.d/nfsd > script changed from "killall -9 nfsd" or whatever it was to > "rpc.nfsd 0". > > But it didn't seem sensible to remove the "kill" functionality until > after a transition process, and I never thought the schedule a formal > deprecation. So it just stayed... > > The more I think about it, the more I am in favour of removing it. I > don't think any other kernel threads can be killed. nfsd doesn't need > to be special. > > Maybe I'll post a patch which just does that. I won't NACK such a patch out-of-hand. It seems like a sensible clean-up, but let's have a look at the details.
