Re: [PATCH v2] Implement close-on-fork

Christian Brauner
2022-06-28T13:13:23Z

On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 11:42:28AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> Hi Matthew, thanks for replying.
>
> > > The need for O_CLOFORK might be made more clear by looking at a
> > > long-standing Go issue, i.e. unrelated to system(3), which was started
> > > in 2017 by Russ Cox when he summed up the current race-condition
> > > behaviour of trying to execve(2) a newly created file:
> > > https://github.com/golang/go/issues/22315.
> >
> > The problem is that people advocating for O_CLOFORK understand its
> > value, but not its cost. Other google employees have a system which
> > has literally millions of file descriptors in a single process.
> > Having to maintain this extra state per-fd is a cost they don't want
> > to pay (and have been quite vocal about earlier in this thread).
>
> So do you agree the userspace issue is best solved by *_CLOFORK and the
> problem is how to implement *_CLOFORK at an acceptable cost?
>
> OTOH David Laight was making suggestions on moving the load to the
> fork/exec path earlier in the thread, but OTOH Al Viro mentioned a
> ‘portable solution’, though that could have been to a specific issue
> rather than the more general case.
>
> How would you recommend approaching an acceptable cost is progressed?
> Iterate on patch versions? Open a bugzilla.kernel.org for central
> tracking and linking from the other projects? ..?

Quoting from that go thread

"If the OS had a "close all fds above x", we could use that. (I don't know of any that do, but it sure would help.)"

So why can't this be solved with:
close_range(fd_first, fd_last, CLOSE_RANGE_CLOEXEC | CLOSE_RANGE_UNSHARE)?
e.g.
close_range(100, ~0U, CLOSE_RANGE_CLOEXEC | CLOSE_RANGE_UNSHARE)?