On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 04:56:08PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
Hi Christian, David,
On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 4:00 PM Christian Brauner christian@brauner.io wrote:
This adds the pidfd_open() syscall. It allows a caller to retrieve pollable pidfds for a process which did not get created via CLONE_PIDFD, i.e. for a process that is created via traditional fork()/clone() calls that is only referenced by a PID:
int pidfd = pidfd_open(1234, 0); ret = pidfd_send_signal(pidfd, SIGSTOP, NULL, 0);
With the introduction of pidfds through CLONE_PIDFD it is possible to created pidfds at process creation time. However, a lot of processes get created with traditional PID-based calls such as fork() or clone() (without CLONE_PIDFD). For these processes a caller can currently not create a pollable pidfd. This is a huge problem for Android's low memory killer (LMK) and service managers such as systemd. Both are examples of tools that want to make use of pidfds to get reliable notification of process exit for non-parents (pidfd polling) and race-free signal sending (pidfd_send_signal()). They intend to switch to this API for process supervision/management as soon as possible. Having no way to get pollable pidfds from PID-only processes is one of the biggest blockers for them in adopting this api. With pidfd_open() making it possible to retrieve pidfd for PID-based processes we enable them to adopt this api.
In line with Arnd's recent changes to consolidate syscall numbers across architectures, I have added the pidfd_open() syscall to all architectures at the same time.
+428 common pidfd_open sys_pidfd_open
This number conflicts with "[PATCH 4/4] uapi: Wire up the mount API syscalls on non-x86 arches", which is requested to be included before rc1.
Yep, already spotted this thanks to Arnd! Will change the syscall numbers.
Thanks! Christian
Note that none of this is part of linux-next.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert-- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds