Re: [PATCH v4] signal: add taskfd_send_signal() syscall

Christian Brauner
2018-12-06T12:53:57Z

On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 01:30:19PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Christian Brauner:
>
> > /* zombies */
> > Zombies can be signaled just as any other process. No special error will be
> > reported since a zombie state is an unreliable state (cf. [3]).
>
> I still disagree with this analysis. If I know that the target process
> is still alive, and it is not, this is a persistent error condition
> which can be reliably reported. Given that someone might send SIGKILL
> to the process behind my back, detecting this error condition could be
> useful.

Apart from my objection that this is not actually a reliable state
because of timing issues between e.g. calling wait and a process exiting
I have two more concerns and one helpful suggestion.
First, this is hooking pretty deep into kernel internals. So far
EXIT_ZOMBIE is only exposed in kernel/exit.c and I don't see enough
value to drag all of this into kernel/signal.c
Second, all other signal syscalls don't do report errors when signaling
to zombies as well. It would be odd if this one suddenly did.
Third, if this really becomes such a big issue for userspace in the
future that we want to do that work then we can add a flag like
TASKFD_DETECT_ZOMBIE (or some such name) that will allow userspace to
get an error back when signaling a zombie.
As far as I'm concerned, this is out of scope for an initial
implementation. We are going to use fds for tasks that's enough
excitement for one patchset!

>
> Rest looks good to me (with the usual caveats).

I take it that's your way of saying Acked-by? :)

Christian