I noticed a bug on the process accounting facility. In multi-threading
process, some data would be recorded incorrectly when the group_leader dies
earlier than one or more threads. The attached patch fixes this problem.
See below. 'bugacct' is a test program that create a worker thread after 4
seconds sleeping, then the group_leader dies soon. The worker thread
consume CPU/Memory for 6 seconds, then exit. We can estimate 10 seconds as
etime and 6 seconds as stime + utime. This is a sample program which the
group_leader dies earlier than other threads.
The results of same binary execution on different kernel are below.
-- accounted records --------------------
| btime | utime | stime | etime | minflt | majflt | comm |
original | 13:16:40 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 6.10 | 171 | 0 | bugacct |
patched | 13:20:21 | 5.83 | 0.18 | 10.03 | 32776 | 0 | bugacct |
(*) bugacct allocates 128MB memory, thus 128MB / 4KB = 32768 of minflt is
appropriate.
-- Test results in original kernel ------
$ date; time -p ./bugacct
Tue Mar 28 13:16:36 JST 2006 <- But pacct said btime is 13:16:40
real 10.11 <- But pacct said etime is 6.10
user 5.96 <- But pacct said utime is 0.00
sys 0.14 <- But pacct said stime is 0.00
$
-- Test results in patched kernel -------
$ date; time -p ./bugacct
Tue Mar 28 13:20:21 JST 2006
real 10.04
user 5.83
sys 0.19
$
In the original 2.6.16 kernel, pacct records btime, utime, stime, etime and
minflt incorrectly. In my opinion, this problem is caused by an assumption
that group_leader dies last.
The following section calculates process running time for etime and btime.
But it means running time of the thread that dies last, not process. The
start_time of the first thread in the process (group_leader) should be
reduced from uptime to calculate etime and btime correctly.
The following section calculates stime and utime of the process.
But it might count the utime and stime of the group_leader duplicatly
and ignore the utime and stime of the thread dies last, when one or
more threads remain after group_leader dead.
The ac_utime should be calculated as the sum of the signal->utime
and utime of the thread dies last. The ac_stime should be done also.