Thread (2 messages) flat view 2 messages, 2 authors, 2006-07-26

Re: [PATCH] kthread: airo.c

From: Andrew Morton <hidden>
Date: 2006-07-26 06:19:08
Also in: lkml

On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:13:09 -0700
Sukadev Bhattiprolu [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Sukadev Bhattiprolu [sukadev@us.ibm.com] wrote:

| Andrew,
| 
| Javier Achirica, one of the major contributors to drivers/net/wireless/airo.c
| took a look at this patch, and doesn't have any problems with it. It doesn't
| fix any bugs and is just a cleanup, so it certainly isn't a candidate
| for this mainline cycle

Here is the same patch, merged up to 2.6.18-rc2. Christoph's patch (see
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/13/332) still applies cleanly on top of this.

-----
The airo driver is currently caching a pid for later use, but with the
implementation of containers, pids themselves do not uniquely identify
a task. The driver is also using kernel_thread() which is deprecated in
drivers.

This patch essentially replaces the kernel_thread() with kthread_create().
It also stores the task_struct of the airo_thread rather than its pid.
Since this introduces a second task_struct in struct airo_info, the patch
renames airo_info.task to airo_info.list_bss_task.

As an extension of these changes, the patch further:

         - replaces kill_proc() with kthread_stop()
         - replaces signal_pending() with kthread_should_stop()
	 - removes thread completion synchronisation which is handled by
	   kthread_stop().

..
@@ -1736,9 +1736,9 @@ static int readBSSListRid(struct airo_in
 		issuecommand(ai, &cmd, &rsp);
 		up(&ai->sem);
 		/* Let the command take effect */
-		ai->task = current;
+		ai->list_bss_task = current;
 		ssleep(3);
-		ai->task = NULL;
+		ai->list_bss_task = NULL;
This looks a little racy to me.  It's relatively benign - a race will cause
us to sleep for too long.  But it's easy to fix:

--- a/drivers/net/wireless/airo.c~kthread-airoc-race-fix
+++ a/drivers/net/wireless/airo.c
@@ -1733,10 +1733,10 @@ static int readBSSListRid(struct airo_in
 		cmd.cmd=CMD_LISTBSS;
 		if (down_interruptible(&ai->sem))
 			return -ERESTARTSYS;
+		ai->list_bss_task = current;
 		issuecommand(ai, &cmd, &rsp);
 		up(&ai->sem);
 		/* Let the command take effect */
-		ai->list_bss_task = current;
 		ssleep(3);
 		ai->list_bss_task = NULL;
 	}
_

<looks more closely>

Actually, ssleep() ends up doing

        while (timeout)
                timeout = schedule_timeout_uninterruptible(timeout);

so if the intent of this code is to terminate the sleep early, when the
interrupt has happened then it isn't working right.  A fix would be to
convert the ssleep(3) into schedule_timeout_uninterruptible(3 * HZ).
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