[PATCH] pidhash: Refactor the pid hash table

Simplifies the code, reduces the need for 4 pid hash tables, and makes the
code more capable.

In the discussions I had with Oleg it was felt that to a large extent the
cleanup itself justified the work.  With struct pid being dynamically
allocated meant we could create the hash table entry when the pid was
allocated and free the hash table entry when the pid was freed.  Instead of
playing with the hash lists when ever a process would attach or detach to a
process.

For myself the fact that it gave what my previous task_ref patch gave for free
with simpler code was a big win.  The problem is that if you hold a reference
to struct task_struct you lock in 10K of low memory.  If you do that in a user
controllable way like /proc does, with an unprivileged but hostile user space
application with typical resource limits of 1000 fds and 100 processes I can
trigger the OOM killer by consuming all of low memory with task structs, on a
machine wight 1GB of low memory.

If I instead hold a reference to struct pid which holds a pointer to my
task_struct, I don't suffer from that problem because struct pid is 2 orders
of magnitude smaller.  In fact struct pid is small enough that most other
kernel data structures dwarf it, so simply limiting the number of referring
data structures is enough to prevent exhaustion of low memory.

This splits the current struct pid into two structures, struct pid and struct
pid_link, and reduces our number of hash tables from PIDTYPE_MAX to just one.
struct pid_link is the per process linkage into the hash tables and lives in
struct task_struct.  struct pid is given an indepedent lifetime, and holds
pointers to each of the pid types.

The independent life of struct pid simplifies attach_pid, and detach_pid,
because we are always manipulating the list of pids and not the hash table.
In addition in giving struct pid an indpendent life it makes the concept much
more powerful.

Kernel data structures can now embed a struct pid * instead of a pid_t and
not suffer from pid wrap around problems or from keeping unnecessarily
large amounts of memory allocated.

Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sched.h b/include/linux/sched.h
index 7e0ff5dba986..541f4828f5e7 100644
--- a/include/linux/sched.h
+++ b/include/linux/sched.h
@@ -760,7 +760,7 @@ struct task_struct {
         struct task_struct *group_leader;       /* threadgroup leader */
 
         /* PID/PID hash table linkage. */
-        struct pid pids[PIDTYPE_MAX];
+        struct pid_link pids[PIDTYPE_MAX];
         struct list_head thread_group;
 
         struct completion *vfork_done;          /* for vfork() */
@@ -899,7 +899,7 @@ static inline pid_t process_group(struct task_struct *tsk)
  */
 static inline int pid_alive(struct task_struct *p)
 {
-        return p->pids[PIDTYPE_PID].nr != 0;
+        return p->pids[PIDTYPE_PID].pid != NULL;
 }
 
 extern void free_task(struct task_struct *tsk);