On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 1:33 AM Yafang Shao [off-list ref] wrote:

There're many truncated kthreads in the kernel, which may make trouble
for the user, for example, the user can't get detailed device
information from the task comm.

This patchset tries to improve this problem fundamentally by extending
the task comm size from 16 to 24. In order to do that, we have to do
some cleanups first.

It looks like a churn that doesn't really address the problem.
If we were to allow long names then make it into a pointer and use 16 byte
as an optimized storage for short names. Any longer name would be a pointer.
In other words make it similar to dentry->d_iname.