I was going through the kernel sources looking for places where the
following sequence occurs:
del_timer(&timer);
... modify timer ...
add_timer(&timer)
To my surprise, I found numerous place where such code appears. I
figured this kind of code will always be (potentially) racy on SMP machines.
Examples are:
1. net/lapb/lapb_timer.c
void lapb_start_t1timer(struct lapb_cb *lapb)
{
del_timer(&lapb->t1timer);
lapb->t1timer.data = (unsigned long)lapb;
lapb->t1timer.function = &lapb_t1timer_expiry;
lapb->t1timer.expires = jiffies + lapb->t1;
add_timer(&lapb->t1timer);
}
mod_timer could have been used.
2. arch/i386/mach-voyager/voyager_thread.c
3. kernel/acct.c
del_timer(&acct_globals.timer);
acct_globals.needcheck = 0;
acct_globals.timer.expires = jiffies + ACCT_TIMEOUT*HZ;
add_timer(&acct_globals.timer);
Would anyone on LKML interested in getting this cleaned up? I could do
it, if it would be useful. Or perhaps someone on Kernel Janitors is
already working on it.
Thanks,
Hareesh Nagarajan
http://www.cs.uic.edu/~hnagaraj