On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 3:34 PM, David M. Lloyd
<david.ll...@redhat.com <mailto:david.ll...@redhat.com>> wrote:
On 04/16/2014 02:15 PM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Peter Levart
<peter.lev...@gmail.com <mailto:peter.lev...@gmail.com>
<mailto:peter.lev...@gmail.com
<mailto:peter.lev...@gmail.com>>> wrote:
There's already such a race in current implementation of
Process.terminate(). It admittedly only concerns a small
window
between process exiting and the reaper thread managing to
signal
this state to the other threads wishing to terminate it at
the same
time, so it could happen that a KILL/TERM signal is sent
to an
already deceased PID which was re-used, but it doesn't
happen in
practice since PIDs are not re-used very soon typically.
But I agree, waiting between listing children and
sending them
signals increases the chance of hitting a reused PID.
We do rely on the OS not reusing a PID _immediately_. We used
to have
bugs in this area where Process.destroy would send a signal to
a pid
that may have deceased arbitrarily long ago.
It seems to me that the key to avoiding this is to ensure that
waitpid() is not called until we know the PID is ready to be
cleaned. As long as waitpid() has not yet been called, we can be
certain that the process still exists and is ours. So the real
question is, how can we know a process is dead without actually
calling wait() (thereby making that knowledge useless)?
The aforementioned /proc trick seems like one good way to do so
without, say, spawning a plethora of threads (though at one
additional FD per thread, it is not free either). Unforunately
/proc is not ubiquitous, and even where it does exist, it's not
standardized (thus its behavior probably cannot be relied upon
absolutely).
A simple solution may be to use a synchronized set of child PIDs,
and set a SIGCHLD handler or waiter which, when triggered, locks
the set and performs a series of waitid() operations with WNOHANG,
processing all the process status updates. The signalling APIs
would be required to synchronize on the set to determine if the
process in question is owned by the parent process. Previously
unknown processes can be "adopted" into this area by acquiring the
synchronization and calling "waitpid()"+WNOHANG on the PID in
question, and using the result to determine whether the PID should
be added to the set (or whether we just reaped it - or whether it
doesn't belong to us at all).
As long as the process API is restricted to managing direct
children, this should work and be safe across all POSIX-ish
environments. Note the potential downside that all children will
be automatically reaped, which is possibly somewhat hostile to
naïve JNI libraries or embedders. Selectively enabling the /proc
trick can mitigate this downside on platforms which support it
however.
--
- DML