Re: [PATCH v5 1/7] mm: pass task and mm to do_madvise

[Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>]

+Jens and io-uring list

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 6:06 PM Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> wrote:
> In upcoming patches, do_madvise will be called from external process
> context so we shouldn't asssume "current" is always hinted process's
> task_struct.
[...]
> [1] http://lore.kernel.org/r/CAG48ez27=pwm5m_N_988xT1huO7g7h6arTQL44zev6TD-h-7Tg@mail.gmail.com
[...]
> diff --git a/fs/io_uring.c b/fs/io_uring.c
[...]
> @@ -2736,7 +2736,7 @@ static int io_madvise(struct io_kiocb *req, struct io_kiocb **nxt,
>         if (force_nonblock)
>                 return -EAGAIN;
>
> -       ret = do_madvise(ma->addr, ma->len, ma->advice);
> +       ret = do_madvise(current, current->mm, ma->addr, ma->len, ma->advice);
>         if (ret < 0)
>                 req_set_fail_links(req);
>         io_cqring_add_event(req, ret);

Jens, can you have a look at this change and the following patch
<https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20200214170520.160271-4-minchan@kernel.org/>
("[PATCH v5 3/7] mm: check fatal signal pending of target process")?
Basically Minchan's patch tries to plumb through the identity of the
target task so that if that task gets killed in the middle of the
operation, the (potentially long-running and costly) madvise operation
can be cancelled. Just passing in "current" instead (which in this
case is the uring worker thread AFAIK) doesn't really break anything,
other than making the optimization not work, but I wonder whether this
couldn't be done more cleanly - maybe by passing in NULL to mean "we
don't know who the target task is", since I think we don't know that
here?