This might be harmless, but looks like a race from code inspection (I
was unable to trigger it). I must admit, I don't understand why we
can't return TIMER_RETRY after 'spin_unlock(&p->sighand->siglock)'
without doing bump_cpu_timer(), but this is what original code does.
posix_cpu_timer_set:
read_lock(&tasklist_lock);
spin_lock(&p->sighand->siglock);
list_del_init(&timer->it.cpu.entry);
spin_unlock(&p->sighand->siglock);
We are probaly deleting the timer from run_posix_cpu_timers's 'firing'
local list_head while run_posix_cpu_timers() does list_for_each_safe.
Various bad things can happen, for example we can just delete this timer
so that list_for_each() will not notice it and run_posix_cpu_timers()
will not reset '->firing' flag. In that case,
....
if (timer->it.cpu.firing) {
read_unlock(&tasklist_lock);
timer->it.cpu.firing = -1;
return TIMER_RETRY;
}
sys_timer_settime() goes to 'retry:', calls posix_cpu_timer_set() again,
it returns TIMER_RETRY ...
Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>