er() takes cputimer->lock. In this case thread_group_cputimer() will set ->running = true again and call thread_group_cputime(). But since we do not hold tasklist or siglock, we can race with fork/exit and copy the wrong results into cputimer->cputime. It is unneeded because if ->running == true we can just use the numbers in cputimer->cputime we already have. Change fastpath_timer_check() to copy cputimer->cputime into the local variable under cputimer->lock. We do not re-check ->running under cputimer->lock, run_posix_cpu_timers() does this check later. Note: we can add more optimizations on top of this change. Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra LKML-Reference: <20100611180446.GA13025@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar ¤?²