From: Oleg Nesterov de_thread: if (atomic_read(&oldsighand->count) <= 1) BUG_ON(atomic_read(&sig->count) != 1); This is not safe without the rmb() in between. The results of two correctly ordered __exit_signal()->atomic_dec_and_test()'s could be seen out of order on our CPU. The same is true for the "thread_group_empty()" case, __unhash_process()'s changes could be seen before atomic_dec_and_test(&sig->count). On some platforms (including i386) atomic_read() doesn't provide even the compiler barrier, in that case these checks are simply racy. Remove these BUG_ON()'s. Alternatively, we can do something like BUG_ON( ({ smp_rmb(); atomic_read(&sig->count) != 1; }) ); Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney Cc: Roland McGrath Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- fs/exec.c | 3 --- 1 files changed, 3 deletions(-) diff -puN fs/exec.c~exec-kill-unsafe-bug_onsig-count-checks fs/exec.c --- a/fs/exec.c~exec-kill-unsafe-bug_onsig-count-checks +++ a/fs/exec.c @@ -784,7 +784,6 @@ static int de_thread(struct task_struct * and we can just re-use it all. */ if (atomic_read(&oldsighand->count) <= 1) { - BUG_ON(atomic_read(&sig->count) != 1); signalfd_detach(tsk); exit_itimers(sig); return 0; @@ -929,8 +928,6 @@ no_thread_group: if (leader) release_task(leader); - BUG_ON(atomic_read(&sig->count) != 1); - if (atomic_read(&oldsighand->count) == 1) { /* * Now that we nuked the rest of the thread group, _