Re: [RFC v2] ptrace, pidfd: add pidfd_ptrace syscall

[Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 06:34:30PM +0200, Hagen Paul Pfeifer wrote:
> Working on a safety-critical stress testing tool, using ptrace in an
> rather uncommon way (stop, peeking memory, ...) for a bunch of
> applications in an automated way I realized that once opened processes
> where restarted and PIDs recycled.  Resulting in monitoring and
> manipulating the wrong processes.
> 
> With the advent of pidfd we are now able to stick with one stable handle
> to identifying processes exactly. We now have the ability to get this
> race free. Sending signals now works like a charm, next step is to
> extend the functionality also for ptrace.
> 
> API:
>          long pidfd_ptrace(int pidfd, enum __ptrace_request request,
>                            void *addr, void *data, unsigned flags);

I'm in general not opposed to this if there's a clear need for this and
users that are interested. But I think if people really prefer having
this a new syscall then we should probably try to improve on the old
one. Things that come to mind right away without doing a deep review are
replacing the void *addr pointer with a dedicated struct ptract_args or
union ptrace_args and a size argument. If we're not doing something
like this or something more fundamental we can equally well either just
duplicate all enums in the old ptrace syscall and append a _PIDFD to it
where it makes sense.

Christian