Re: RFC [patch 13/34] PID Virtualization Define new task_pid api

On Jan 21, 2006, at 09:42, Eric W. Biederman wrote: 
Hubertus Franke <frankeh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Actions: The vpid_to_pid will disappear and the check for whether we are in the same container needs to be pushed down into the task lookup. question remains to figure out whether the context of the task lookup (will always remain the caller ?).

Any place the kernel saves a pid and then proceeds to signal it later. At that later point in time it is possibly you will be in the wrong context.

This probably justifies having a kpid_t that has both the process
space id and the pid in it.  For when the kernel is storing pids to
use as weak references, for signal purposes etc.

The kernel should not be saving a PID. The kernel should be sticking a pointer to a struct task_struct somewhere (with appropriate refcounting) and using that.

The only way I know to make this change safely is to make compilation of all functions that manipulate pids in possibly dangerous ways fail. And then to manually and slowly fix them up.

That way if something is missed. You get a compile error instead of incorrect execution.

I agree. This is one of the things I really liked about the recent mutex patch; it added a lot of checks to various codepaths to verify at both compile time and run time that the code was correct.

My personal opinion is that we need to add a new race-free API, say open("/proc/fork"); that forks a process and returns an open "process handle", essentially a filehandle that references a particular process. (Also, an open("/proc/self/handle") or something to return a current-process handle) Through some method of signaling the kernel (syscall, ioctl, some other?) a process can send a signal to the process referenced by the handle, check its status, etc. A process handle might be passed to other processes using a UNIX-domain socket. You would be able to dup() a process handle and then restrict the set of valid operations on the new process handle, so that it could be passed to another process without giving that process access to the full set of operations (check status only, not able to send a signal, for example).

Obviously we would need to maintain support for the old interface for some period of time, but I think the new one would make it much easier to write simple race-free programs.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible
  -- Alan Kay



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