The problem, reported in:

  http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5859

and by various other email messages and lkml posts is that the cpuset hook
in the oom (out of memory) code can try to take a cpuset semaphore while
holding the tasklist_lock (a spinlock).

One must not sleep while holding a spinlock.

The fix seems easy enough - move the cpuset semaphore region outside the
tasklist_lock region.

This required a few lines of mechanism to implement.  The oom code where
the locking needs to be changed does not have access to the cpuset locks,
which are internal to kernel/cpuset.c only.  So I provided a couple more
cpuset interface routines, available to the rest of the kernel, which
simple take and drop the lock needed here (cpusets callback_sem).
Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>