Re: [PATCH 0/6] Allow signals for IO threads

Stefan Metzmacher
2021-04-03T00:49:06Z

Am 01.04.21 um 18:24 schrieb Linus Torvalds:
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 9:00 AM Stefan Metzmacher <metze@samba.org> wrote:
>>
>> I haven't tried it, but it seems gdb tries to use PTRACE_PEEKUSR
>> against the last thread tid listed under /proc/<pid>/tasks/ in order to
>> get the architecture for the userspace application
>
> Christ, what an odd hack. Why wouldn't it just do it on the initial
> thread you actually attached to?
>
> Are you sure it's not simply because your test-case was to attach to
> the io_uring thread? Because the io_uring thread might as well be
> considered to be 64-bit.

│ └─io_uring-cp,1396 Makefile file
│ ├─{iou-mgr-1396},1397
│ ├─{iou-wrk-1396},1398
│ └─{iou-wrk-1396},1399

strace -ttT -o strace-uring-fail.txt gdb --pid 1396
(note strace -f would deadlock gdb with SIGSTOP)

The full file can be found here:
https://www.samba.org/~metze/strace-uring-fail.txt
(I guess there was a race and the workers 1398 and 1399 exited in between,
that's it using 1397):

18:46:35.429498 ptrace(PTRACE_PEEKUSER, 1397, 8*CS, [NULL]) = 0 <0.000022>

>> so my naive assumption
>> would be that it wouldn't allow the detection of a 32-bit application
>> using a 64-bit kernel.
>
> I'm not entirely convinced we want to care about a confused gdb
> implementation and somebody debugging a case that I don't believe
> happens in practice.
>
> 32-bit user space is legacy. And legacy isn't io_uring. If somebody
> insists on doing odd things, they can live with the odd results.

Ok, I'd agree for 32-bit applications, but what about libraries?
E.g. distributions ship libraries like libsmbclient or nss modules
as 64-bit and 32-bit version, in order to support legacy applications
to run. Why shouldn't the 32-bit library builds not support io_uring?
(Note libsmbclient don't use io_uring yet, but I guess it will be in future).

Any ideas regarding similar problems for other architectures?

metze