truncated lines in /proc/net/tcp

[Arnout Engelen <arnouten@bzzt.net>]

Hi,

I noticed lines in the output of /proc/net/tcp sometimes appear 'truncated', like
this:

  52: 010310AC:9D95 030310AC:1770 06 00000000:00000000 03:0000146C
  00000000     0        0 0 2 c4e3f0c0

(also notice that the inode is '0' instead of some large integer)

This is print by the code at:

  http://lxr.linux.no/source/net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c?v=2.6.8.1#L2504

Maybe the value of 'tp' gets invalidated at some point during the
gathering of the data to be printed there?

(note that I'm not myself a kernel developer. I ran into this when
writing a userspace application and decided I wanted to know why this
happened. I saw this behaviour on a 2.4.26 kernel, but the code 
doesn't appear to be significantly different in 2.6. I'm not subscribed 
to the LKML, so if you want to ask me something please CC me personally).

-- 
Arnout Engelen <arnouten@bzzt.net>

  "If it sounds good, it /is/ good."
          -- Duke Ellington