posix-cpu-timers: Store a reference to a pid not a task

posix cpu timers do not handle the death of a process well.

This is most clearly seen when a multi-threaded process calls exec from a
thread that is not the leader of the thread group.  The posix cpu timer code
continues to pin the old thread group leader and is unable to find the
siglock from there.

This results in posix_cpu_timer_del being unable to delete a timer,
posix_cpu_timer_set being unable to set a timer.  Further to compensate for
the problems in posix_cpu_timer_del on a multi-threaded exec all timers
that point at the multi-threaded task are stopped.

The code for the timers fundamentally needs to check if the target
process/thread is alive.  This needs an extra level of indirection. This
level of indirection is already available in struct pid.

So replace cpu.task with cpu.pid to get the needed extra layer of
indirection.

In addition to handling things more cleanly this reduces the amount of
memory a timer can pin when a process exits and then is reaped from
a task_struct to the vastly smaller struct pid.

Fixes: e0a70217107e ("posix-cpu-timers: workaround to suppress the problems with mt exec")
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/87wo86tz6d.fsf@x220.int.ebiederm.org

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/posix-timers.h b/include/linux/posix-timers.h
index 3d10c84a97a9..e3f0f8585da4 100644
--- a/include/linux/posix-timers.h
+++ b/include/linux/posix-timers.h
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ static inline int clockid_to_fd(const clockid_t clk)
 struct cpu_timer {
 	struct timerqueue_node	node;
 	struct timerqueue_head	*head;
-	struct task_struct	*task;
+	struct pid		*pid;
 	struct list_head	elist;
 	int			firing;
 };