Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 27 Dec 2013 15:02:11 -0800 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] lib/vsprintf: add %pT[C012] format specifier |
| |
On Wed, 25 Dec 2013 21:37:33 +0900 Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp> wrote:
> Some examples for converting direct ->comm users are shown below. > > pr_info("comm=%s\n", p->comm); => pr_info("comm=%pTC\n", p); > pr_info("%s[%u]\n", p->comm, p->pid); => pr_info("%pT0\n", p); > pr_info("%s[%u]\n", p->comm, task_pid_nr(p)); => pr_info("%pT0\n", p); > pr_info("%s/%u\n", p->comm, p->pid); => pr_info("%pT1\n", p); > pr_info("%s,%u\n", p->comm, p->pid); => pr_info("%pT2\n", p);
Places where one task accesses a different tasks's ->comm are rare, and those places damn well better have a lot of locking in place - otherwise they are racy against much more serious things than prctl().
The vast majority of ->comm accesses are accessing current->comm, for debug reasons. I'm counting 350-odd sites. At all these sites it's pointless passing `current' to the printk function at all!
I wonder if there's some way in which we can invent a vsprintf token which means "insert corrent->comm here" and which doesn't require that the caller pass in the additional argument?
That being said.....
current->comm isn't a terribly good way of identifying a task - it's unaware of namespaces, is non-unique, userspace can overwrite ->comm[] to anything it wants and evil users can probably write silly stuff into ->comm[] to confuse sysadmin tools.
So perhaps the world would be a better place if we were to invent a standard kernel-wide way of identifying a process within a debug printk. Presumably it would include ->comm and the pid, but other things can be added later if needed.
So a usage site would look like:
pr_warn("%s: hair on fire\n", this_task_id());
but we need storage so it's really
char b[THIS_TASK_ID_SIZE];
pr_warn("%s: hair on fire\n", this_task_id(b));
which is painful, so we also provide the new vsprintf token as a convenience:
pr_warn("%|: hair on fire\n");
but I don't know what we can use in place of %|.
| |