Re: [PATCH 0/2] Don't show PF_IO_WORKER in /proc//task/

Eric W. Biederman
2021-03-25T19:35:25Z

Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Stefan reports that attaching to a task with io_uring will leave gdb
> very confused and just repeatedly attempting to attach to the IO threads,
> even though it receives an -EPERM every time. This patchset proposes to
> skip PF_IO_WORKER threads as same_thread_group(), except for accounting
> purposes which we still desire.
>
> We also skip listing the IO threads in /proc/<pid>/task/ so that gdb
> doesn't think it should stop and attach to them. This makes us consistent
> with earlier kernels, where these async threads were not related to the
> ring owning task, and hence gdb (and others) ignored them anyway.
>
> Seems to me that this is the right approach, but open to comments on if
> others agree with this. Oleg, I did see your messages as well on SIGSTOP,
> and as was discussed with Eric as well, this is something we most
> certainly can revisit. I do think that the visibility of these threads
> is a separate issue. Even with SIGSTOP implemented (which I did try as
> well), we're never going to allow ptrace attach and hence gdb would still
> be broken. Hence I'd rather treat them as separate issues to attack.

A quick skim shows that these threads are not showing up anywhere in
proc which appears to be a problem, as it hides them from top.

Sysadmins need the ability to dig into a system and find out where all
their cpu usage or io's have gone when there is a problem. I general I
think this argues that these threads should show up as threads of the
process so I am not even certain this is the right fix to deal with gdb.

Eric