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authorThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>2007-06-21 20:45:15 +0000
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org>2007-06-21 15:57:04 -0700
commit58229a18994215bbfe0bcd1c99d2e039f30b076b (patch)
treec910efcef828d1bc5dd3e43a9575a8164504779c /arch
parentb9bae3402572dc50a1e084c5b1ae5117918ef0f0 (diff)
posix-timers: Prevent softirq starvation by small intervals and SIG_IGN
posix-timers which deliver an ignored signal are currently rearmed in the timer softirq: This is necessary because the timer needs to be delivered again when SIG_IGN is removed. This is not a problem, when the interval is reasonable. With high resolution timers enabled one might arm a posix timer with a very small interval and ignore the signal. This might lead to a softirq starvation when the interval is so small that the timer is requeued onto the softirq pending list right away. This problem was pointed out by Jan Kiszka. Thanks Jan ! The correct solution would be to stop the timer, when the signal is ignored and rearm it when SIG_IGN is removed. Unfortunately this requires modification in sigaction and involves non trivial sighand locking. It's too late in the release cycle for such a change. For now we just keep the timer running and enforce that the timer only fires every jiffie. This does not break anything as we keep the overrun counter correct. It adds a little inaccuracy to the timer_gettime() interface, but... The more complex change is necessary anyway to fix another short coming of the current implementation, which I discovered while looking at this problem: A pending signal is discarded when SIG_IGN is set. In case that a posixtimer signal is pending then it is discarded as well, but when SIG_IGN is removed later nothing rearms the timer. This is not new, it's that way since posix timers have been merged. So nothing to worry about right now. I have a working solution to fix all of this, but the impact is too large for both stable and 2.6.22. I'm going to send it out for review in the next days. This should go into 2.6.21.stable as well. Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@web.de> Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> Cc: Stable Team <stable@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'arch')
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