Re: Runaway cron task on 2.5.63/4 bk?

[Linus Torvalds]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, george anzinger wrote:
> 
> Lets consider this one on its own merits.  What SHOULD sleep do when 
> asked to sleep for MAX_INT number of jiffies or more, i.e. when 
> jiffies overflows?  My notion, above, it that it is clearly an error. 

My suggestion (in order of preference):
 - sleep the max amount, and then restart as if a signal had happened
 - sleep the max amount (old behaviour)
 - consider it an error (new behaviour)

In this case the error case actually helped find the other unrelated bug, 
so in this case the error actually _helped_ us. However, that was only 
"help" from a kernel perspective, from a user perspective I definitely 
think that it makes no sense to have "sleep(largenum)" return -EINVAL.

And in the end it's the user that matters.

		Linus