k at to scan a linked list, and the worst case of having to scan the entire pid bitmap is pretty reasonable. If we need something more efficient we can go to a more efficient data structure for indexing the pids, but for now what we have should be sufficient. In addition this takes no additional locks and is actually less code than what we are doing now. Also another very subtle bug in this area has been fixed. It is possible to catch a task in the middle of de_thread where a thread is assuming the thread of it's thread group leader. This patch carefully handles that case so if we hit it we don't fail to return the pid, that is undergoing the de_thread dance. Thanks to KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki for providing the first fix, pointing this out and working on it. [oleg@tv-sign.ru: fix it] Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki Signed-off-by: Oleg Nesterov Cc: Jean Delvare Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds