Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] pidfs: ensure consistent ENOENT/ESRCH reporting

Christian Brauner
2025-04-16T19:47:39Z

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 03:55:48PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 03:34:54PM -0700, Nathan Chancellor wrote:
> > Hi Christian,
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 11, 2025 at 03:22:43PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > > In a prior patch series we tried to cleanly differentiate between:
> > >
> > > (1) The task has already been reaped.
> > > (2) The caller requested a pidfd for a thread-group leader but the pid
> > > actually references a struct pid that isn't used as a thread-group
> > > leader.
> > >
> > > as this was causing issues for non-threaded workloads.
> > >
> > > But there's cases where the current simple logic is wrong. Specifically,
> > > if the pid was a leader pid and the check races with __unhash_process().
> > > Stabilize this by using the pidfd waitqueue lock.
> >
> > After the recent work in vfs-6.16.pidfs (I tested at
> > a9d7de0f68b79e5e481967fc605698915a37ac13), I am seeing issues with using
> > 'machinectl shell' to connect to a systemd-nspawn container on one of my
> > machines running Fedora 41 (the container is using Rawhide).
> >
> > $ machinectl shell -q nathan@$DEV_IMG $SHELL -l
> > Failed to get shell PTY: Connection timed out
> >
> > My initial bisect attempt landed on the merge of the first series
> > (1e940fff9437), which does not make much sense because 4fc3f73c16d was
> > allegedly good in my test, but I did not investigate that too hard since
> > I have lost enough time on this as it is heh. It never reproduces at
> > 6.15-rc1 and it consistently reproduces at a9d7de0f68b so I figured I
> > would report it here since you mention this series is a fix for the
> > first one. If there is any other information I can provide or patches I
> > can test (either as fixes or for debugging), I am more than happy to do
> > so.

I can't reproduce this issue at all with vfs-6.16.pidfs unfortunately.

>
> Does the following patch make a difference for you?:
>
> diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c
> index f7403e1fb0d4..dd30f7e09917 100644
> --- a/kernel/fork.c
> +++ b/kernel/fork.c
> @@ -2118,7 +2118,7 @@ int pidfd_prepare(struct pid *pid, unsigned int flags, struct file **ret)
> scoped_guard(spinlock_irq, &pid->wait_pidfd.lock) {
> /* Task has already been reaped. */
> if (!pid_has_task(pid, PIDTYPE_PID))
> - return -ESRCH;
> + return -EINVAL;
> /*
> * If this struct pid isn't used as a thread-group
> * leader but the caller requested to create a
>
> If it did it would be weird if the first merge is indeed marked as good.
> What if you used a non-rawhide version of systemd? Because this might
> also be a regression on their side.