Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

quoted text
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Eric W. Biederman
> <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>>
>> No.  When we send a signal to multiple processes it needs to be an
>> atomic operation so that kill -KILL -pgrp won't let processes escape.
>> It is what posix specifies, it is what real programs expect, and it
>> is the useful semantic in userspace.
>
> Ok. However, in that case, it's not really about the whole list
> traversal, it's a totally separate thing, and it's really sad that we
> end up using the (rather hot) tasklist_lock for something like that.
> With the dcache/inode locks basically going away, I think
> tasklist_lock ends up being one of the few hot locks left.

It is about the list traversal.  In the process group case it is about
traversing the pid->tasks[PIDTYPE_PGID] hlist, which is also protected
by the tasklist_lock.

quoted text
> Wouldn't it be much nicer to:
>  - make it clear that all the "real" signal locking can rely on RCU
>  - use a separate per-pgrp lock that ends up being the one that gives
> the signal _semantic_ meaning?
>
> That would automatically document why we get the lock too, which
> certainly isn't clear from the code as-is.
>
> The per-pgrp lock might be something as simple as a silly hash that
> just spreads out the process groups over some random number of simple
> spinlocks.

I think it is totally reasonable to add a per pid lock,
that would protect the pid->task[...] hlist.  That would make
things clearer and finer grained without a lot of effort.  Just
a little more struct pid bloat, and a little extra care in fork,
when we add to those lists.

Even with the per-pgrp lock we still need a lock on the global process
list for the kill -KILL -1 case.  Which suggests that tasklist_lock is
still needed for part of kill_something_info.

Eric
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