Re: [TIP,BISECTED] Negative nice values have become big positivenumbers

From: Frederic Weisbecker
Date: Mon Mar 09 2009 - 16:15:27 EST


On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 11:18:50PM +0000, Sitsofe Wheeler wrote:
> (Forgot to cc lkml. Resending...)
>
> Formally negative nice values have started become very big in positive
> integers in -tip kernels:
>
> 2 root 15 2147483647 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd


The weird thing here is that number: 2147483647
It is 0xefffffff
Which means -1 without the highest bit (the sign).
I really don't know how it could have happened.

Anyway, I caught something in the signedness bits from my patch that unifies
the format decoding.
I've never seen your bug on my machine. But I note you have a 32 bits CPU.
Mine is 64 bits with a 64 bits kernel. Perhaps some weird signedness related things
happened because of the signedness bug that the following patch fixes.

Since there are no negative values in my dmesg, I did not catch this bug until now
(and my top output is normal).

Can you please give it a try?

Thanks a lot!

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