Re: weirdness with ->mm vs ->active_mm handling

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Benjamin LaHaise wrote:
> 
> In trying to track down a bug, I found routines like generic_file_read 
> getting called with current->mm == NULL.  This seems to be a valid state 
> for lazy tlb tasks, but the code throughout the kernel doesn't seem to 
> assume that.

Hmm.. Have you actually ever seen this?

When tsk->mm is NULL, you should never EVER get a page fault, except for 
the one special case of the vmalloc'ed area (which is tested for in 
do_page_fault() before we even _look_ at "tsk->mm").

In fact, do_page_fault() very much checks

	if (in_atomic() || !mm)
		goto no_context;  

which says that a page fault when in a lazy TLB context should always
cause a trap, killing the thing (or, if the access has a fixup, calling
the fixup - although I don't think that should happen in any normal code)

In other words: I think your patch is "functionally correct", in that it
should work fine, but on the other hand having a NULL tsk->mm and trying
to do any user-level access is _so_ wrong that I'd much rather take a NULL
pointer fault than try to do something "sane" about it.

		Linus

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