On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 11:23 AM, Dave Jones <da...@codemonkey.org.uk> wrote: > > To put my mind at rest though, am I wrong about that absent task_lock() stuff > ?
So the task shouldn't be going away, because we are using the proc_single_file_operations, which use proc_single_show(), which in turn do a task = get_pid_task(pid, PIDTYPE_PID); ... put_task_struct(task); around it all. So dereferencing the task pointer is all safe, and the only reason to use task_lock() is if you end up doing something more complicated. I'm not seeing anything wrong there. It does do the get_task_mm() before touching mm fields, and the signal fields get protected by lock_task_sighand(). The rest seems to just dereference the task struct directly, and if those values fluctuate that's fine: you get one or the other, no amount of locking will make /proc/pid/status give "reliable" values in the big picture, since the user-space reader won't have the lock anyway. So it all looks fine to me, but I'm not saying I did some exhaustive check. Linus