From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail202.messagelabs.com (mail202.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.227]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 375926B0055 for ; Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:38:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [RFC] set the thread name From: Stefani Seibold Content-Type: text/plain Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:39:52 +0200 Message-Id: <1245177592.14543.1.camel@wall-e> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: linux-kernel , linux-mm , Andrew Morton List-ID: Currently it is not easy to identify a thread in linux, because there is no thread name like in some other OS. If there were are thread name then we could extend a kernel segv message and the /proc//task//... entries by a TName value like this: cat /proc/492/task/495/status Name: test TName: RX-Data <- this is the thread identification field State: S (sleeping) Tgid: 492 Pid: 495 PPid: 1 . . . This will it make much easier to determinate which thread id is associated to a logical thread. It would be possible do this without add a new entry to the task_struct. Just use the comm entry which is available, because it has the same value as the group_leader->comm entry. The only thing to do is to replace all task_struct->comm access by task_struct->group_leader->comm to have the old behavior. This can be eventually encapsulated by a macro. The task_struct->comm of a non group_leader would be than the name of the thread. The only drawback is that there are a lot of files which must be modified. A quick find linux-2.6.30 -type f | xargs grep -l -e "->comm\>" | wc -l shows 215 files. But this can be handled. So i propose a new system call to give a thread a name. What do you think? Greetings, Stefani -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org