Re: + prctl-add-pr_setget_child_reaper-to-allow-simple-process-supervision .patch added to -mm tree

Oleg Nesterov
2011-08-17T11:58:42Z

On 08/16, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> From: Lennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>
>
> Userspace service managers/supervisors need to track their started
> services. Many services daemonize by double-forking and get implicitely
> re-parented to PID 1. The process manager will no longer be able to
> receive the SIGCHLD signals for them.
>
> With this prctl, a service manager can mark itself as a sort of 'sub-init'
> process, able to stay as the parent process for all processes created by
> the started services. All SIGCHLD signals will be delivered to the
> service manager.

I try to never argue with the new features. But to be honest, this
doesn't look very good to me.

OK, a service manager M does prctl(PR_SET_CHILD_REAPER), then it forks
a service X which forks another child C and exits. Then C exits and
notifies M.

But. How can M know that the service X should be restarted? It only
knows the pid. What if wait(WEXITED) succeeds because C in turn does
fork + exit? What M has 2 or more services?

Anyway, the implementation is certainly buggy.

> @@ -1296,6 +1296,8 @@ struct task_struct {
> * execve */
> unsigned in_iowait:1;
>
> + /* Reparent child processes to this process instead of pid 1. */
> + unsigned child_reaper:1;

First of all - this is already very wrong imho. This should be
per-process, not per-thread.

> + /* find the first ancestor which is marked as child_reaper */
> + for (reaper = father->parent;
> + reaper != &init_task && reaper != pid_ns->child_reaper;
> + reaper = reaper->parent)

This loop can never reach init_task/child_reaper and crash the kernel.
For example, father->parent can point to init_task's sub-thread.

OTOH you shouldn't use init_task at all.

Also. You shouldn't do this if the sub-namespace init exits, this is
wrong.

> + if (reaper->child_reaper)
> + return reaper;

No, we can't blindly return this task, it can be dead/exiting. More
precisely, we must not do this if it has already passed
forget_original_parent(). That is why the code above checks PF_EXITING.

Oleg.