core-process-v5.4
waitid: Add support for waiting for the current process group
It was recently discovered that the linux version of waitid is not a
superset of the other wait functions because it does not include support
for waiting for the current process group. This has two downsides:
1. An extra system call is needed to get the current process group.
2. After the current process group is received and before it is passed
to waitid a signal could arrive causing the current process group to change.
Inherent race-conditions as these make it impossible for userspace to
emulate this functionaly and thus violate async-signal safety
requirements for waitpid.
Arguments can be made for using a different choice of idtype and id
for this case but the BSDs already use this P_PGID and 0 to indicate
waiting for the current process's process group. So be nice to user
space programmers and don't introduce an unnecessary incompatibility.
Some people have noted that the posix description is that
waitpid will wait for the current process group, and that in
the presence of pthreads that process group can change. To get
clarity on this issue I looked at XNU, FreeBSD, and Luminos. All of
those flavors of unix waited for the current process group at the
time of call and as written could not adapt to the process group
changing after the call.
At one point Linux did adapt to the current process group changing but
that stopped in 161550d74c07 ("pid: sys_wait... fixes"). It has been
over 11 years since Linux has that behavior, no programs that fail
with the change in behavior have been reported, and I could not
find any other unix that does this. So I think it is safe to clarify
the definition of current process group, to current process group
at the time of the wait function.
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@sifive.com>
Cc: Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>
Cc: Alistair Francis <alistair23@gmail.com>
Cc: Zong Li <zongbox@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Cc: Adhemerval Zanella <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>
Cc: GNU C Library <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20190814154400.6371-2-christian.brauner@ubuntu.com
1 file changed
