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

Jürg Billeter
2018-12-06T12:45:39Z

On Thu, 2018-12-06 at 13:30 +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.

As I understand it, kill() behaves the same way. I think it's good that
this new syscall keeps the behavior as close as possible to kill().
E.g., this would allow emulating kill() (or a higher level API
equivalent) on top of taskfds without subtle differences in behavior.

As the new syscall supports flags, we could consider introducing a flag
that changes the behavior in the zombie case. However, I think that
should be a separate discussion (after merge of the syscall) and the
default behavior makes sense as is.

Jürg