As long as a pidfd is on a child it can be safely reaped. Taking it
would mean the child would now have to be awaited through its pid, but could also
be awaited through the pidfd. This could then suffer from a recycling race.
Background:
Over the last year, pidfd support was added to the Linux kernel. This
allows interacting with other processes. In particular, this allows
waiting on a child process with a timeout in a race-free way, bypassing
all of the awful signal-handler tricks that are usually required.
Pidfds can be obtained for a child process (as well as any other
process) via the `pidfd_open` syscall. Unfortunately, this requires
several conditions to hold in order to be race-free (i.e. the pid is not
reused).
Per `man pidfd_open`:
```
· the disposition of SIGCHLD has not been explicitly set to SIG_IGN
(see sigaction(2));
· the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag was not specified while establishing a han‐
dler for SIGCHLD or while setting the disposition of that signal to
SIG_DFL (see sigaction(2)); and
· the zombie process was not reaped elsewhere in the program (e.g.,
either by an asynchronously executed signal handler or by wait(2)
or similar in another thread).
If any of these conditions does not hold, then the child process
(along with a PID file descriptor that refers to it) should instead
be created using clone(2) with the CLONE_PIDFD flag.
```
Sadly, these conditions are impossible to guarantee once any libraries
are used. For example, C code runnng in a different thread could call
`wait()`, which is impossible to detect from Rust code trying to open a
pidfd.
While pid reuse issues should (hopefully) be rare in practice, we can do
better. By passing the `CLONE_PIDFD` flag to `clone()` or `clone3()`, we
can obtain a pidfd for the child process in a guaranteed race-free
manner.
This PR:
This PR adds Linux-specific process extension methods to allow obtaining
pidfds for processes spawned via the standard `Command` API. Other than
being made available to user code, the standard library does not make
use of these pidfds in any way. In particular, the implementation of
`Child::wait` is completely unchanged.
Two Linux-specific helper methods are added: `CommandExt::create_pidfd`
and `ChildExt::pidfd`. These methods are intended to serve as a building
block for libraries to build higher-level abstractions - in particular,
waiting on a process with a timeout.
I've included a basic test, which verifies that pidfds are created iff
the `create_pidfd` method is used. This test is somewhat special - it
should always succeed on systems with the `clone3` system call
available, and always fail on systems without `clone3` available. I'm
not sure how to best ensure this programatically.
This PR relies on the newer `clone3` system call to pass the `CLONE_FD`,
rather than the older `clone` system call. `clone3` was added to Linux
in the same release as pidfds, so this shouldn't unnecessarily limit the
kernel versions that this code supports.
Unresolved questions:
* What should the name of the feature gate be for these newly added
methods?
* Should the `pidfd` method distinguish between an error occurring
and `create_pidfd` not being called?
