Re: [PATCH] fix TASK_STOPPED vs TASK_NONINTERACTIVE interaction

From: Paulo Marques
Date: Thu Sep 29 2005 - 11:26:53 EST


Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Oleg Nesterov wrote:

[...]
However, TASK_NONINTERACTIVE > TASK_STOPPED, so this loop will not
count TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE | TASK_NONINTERACTIVE threads.

[...]
Using ">" for task states is wrong. It's a bitmask, and if you want to check multiple states, then we should just do so with

if (t->state & (TASK_xxx | TASK_yyy | ...))

Oh, well. The inequality comparisons are shorter, and historical, so I guess it's debatable whether we should remove them all.

I did a quick grep through 2.6.14-rc2 to see how many "them all" were, and the only two places I could find, where a inequality operator was being used on a task state, were this one in kernel/signal.c and another in kernel/exit.c:

./kernel/exit.c:1194: unlikely(p->state > TASK_STOPPED)

So maybe it is not so bad to just change these to a bit mask and disallow inequality comparisons in the future, if you guys feel that is the way to go...

--
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our
adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain
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