Date: 27 Jan 2009 19:15:00 +0100
From: lirc@bartelmus.de (Christoph Bartelmus)
To: torvalds@linux-foundation.org
Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org
Cc: apw@shadowen.org
Cc: kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com
Cc: kyle@infradead.org
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Message-ID: <Aufg85sZjFB@christoph>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0901270741490.3123@localhost.localdomain>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] make checkpatch warn about access to current->comm
User-Agent: OpenXP/4.10.7369 (Linux) (i386)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 971
Lines: 25

On 27 Jan 09 at 07:45, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Kyle McMartin wrote:
>>
>> Suggest using the get_task_comm accessor versus direct access to
>> current->comm.

> I think "current->comm" is fine, and not racy.
>
> It only gets racy when you ask for the name of _another_ task.
>
> And quite frankly, I don't think anybody but /proc does that anyway. I
> think this whole "get_task_comm()" thing is overrated. Most people are
> better off doing just "current->comm".

This issue only came up because for someone like me it's not obvious at  
all that using "current->comm" is safe and the comment in sched.h  
explicitly points out that task_struct.comm should be accessed with  
[gs]et_task_comm.

Christoph
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/