Re: [patch 2/2] alarm unsigned signed conversion fixup

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 15:18 +0000, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> plain text document attachment (alarm-fixup-unsigned-signed.patch)
> alarm() calls the kernel with an unsigend int timeout in seconds.
> The value is converted to a timeval which is used to setup the
> itimer. The tv_sec field of the timeval is a long, which causes
> the timeout to be negative on 32 bit machines if seconds > INT_MAX.
> Also this was silently caught before the hrtimer merge. 
> To avoid fixups all over the place the duplicated sys_alarm code 
> is moved to itimer.c.

Also this needs a better explanation.

The timeval_to_jiffies conversion converted the resulting negative value
to MAX_JIFFIES_PER_LONG.

hrtimer treats the negative value as expired. The valid range for
alarm() is 1 .. UINT_MAX, so ignoring the conversion problem would cause
early expiry and break valid userspace code.

	tglx


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