[Devel] Re: [PATCH 1/7] containers (V7): Generic container system abstracted from cpusets code

[Paul Menage]

On 2/12/07, Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa at in.ibm.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 12:15:22AM -0800, menage at google.com wrote:
> > +void container_fork(struct task_struct *child)
> > +{
> > +     task_lock(current);
>
> Can't this be just rcu_read_lock()?
>

In this particular patch (which is an almost verbatim
extraction/renaming of the generic bits of the cpusets code into
container.c) it probably could - but the main patch that adds the
container_group support would lose it since we use kref to refcount
container_group objects, and hence they're freed when their refcount
reaches zero. RCU is still fine for reading the container_group
pointers, but it's no good for updating them, since by the time you
update it it may no longer be your container_group structure, and may
instead be about to be deleted as soon as the other thread's
rcu_synchronize() completes.

Paul