• Andrew Morton's avatar
    [PATCH] Fix setpgid and threads · feaecce4
    Andrew Morton authored
    From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
    
    I'm resending my patch to fix this problem.  To recap: every task_struct
    has its own copy of the thread group's pgrp.  Only the thread group
    leader is allowed to change the tgrp's pgrp, but it only updates its own
    copy of pgrp, while all the other threads in the tgrp use the old value
    they inherited on creation.
    
    This patch simply updates all the other thread's pgrp when the tgrp
    leader changes pgrp.  Ulrich has already expressed reservations about
    this patch since it is (1) incomplete (it doesn't cover the case of
    other ids which have similar problems), (2) racy (it doesn't synchronize
    with other threads looking at the task pgrp, so they could see an
    inconsistent view) and (3) slow (it takes linear time with respect to
    the number of threads in the tgrp).
    
    My reaction is that (1) it fixes the actual bug I'm encountering in a
    real program.  (2) doesn't really matter for pgrp, since it is mostly an
    issue with respect to the terminal job-control code (which is even more
    broken without this patch.  Regarding (3), I think there are very few
    programs which have a large number of threads which change process group
    id on a regular basis (a heavily multi-threaded job-control shell?).
    
    Ulrich also said he has a (proposed?) much better fix, which I've been
    looking forward to.  I'm submitting this patch as a stop-gap fix for a
    real bug, and perhaps to prompt the improved patch.
    
    An alternative fix, at least for pgrp, is to change all references to
    ->pgrp to group_leader->pgrp.  This may be sufficient on its own, but it
    would be a reasonably intrusive patch (I count 95 instances in 32 files
    in the 2.6.0-test3-mm3 tree).
    feaecce4
pid.c 7.45 KB