Re: [PATCH RFC 1/2] Add polling support to pidfd

From: Joel Fernandes <joel@joelfernandes.org>
To: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
	Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
	kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>,
	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
	Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>,
	Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>,
	Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
	Andrei Vagin <avagin@gmail.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
	linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org, Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>,
	Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com>, Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>,
	Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>,
	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
	Taehee Yoo <ap420073@gmail.com>, Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	kernel-team <kernel-team@android.com>,
	Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 1/2] Add polling support to pidfd
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2019 17:13:19 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190419211319.GA44851@google.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190419200059.r2f7i7jtlsza4eun@brauner.io>

On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 10:01:00PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 03:49:02PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 09:18:59PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 03:02:47PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 07:26:44PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > > > > On April 18, 2019 7:23:38 PM GMT+02:00, Jann Horn <jannh@google.com> wrote:
> > > > > >On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 3:09 PM Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > > >> On 04/16, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > > > > >> > On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 02:04:31PM +0200, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> > > > > >> > >
> > > > > >> > > Could you explain when it should return POLLIN? When the whole
> > > > > >process exits?
> > > > > >> >
> > > > > >> > It returns POLLIN when the task is dead or doesn't exist anymore,
> > > > > >or when it
> > > > > >> > is in a zombie state and there's no other thread in the thread
> > > > > >group.
> > > > > >>
> > > > > >> IOW, when the whole thread group exits, so it can't be used to
> > > > > >monitor sub-threads.
> > > > > >>
> > > > > >> just in case... speaking of this patch it doesn't modify
> > > > > >proc_tid_base_operations,
> > > > > >> so you can't poll("/proc/sub-thread-tid") anyway, but iiuc you are
> > > > > >going to use
> > > > > >> the anonymous file returned by CLONE_PIDFD ?
> > > > > >
> > > > > >I don't think procfs works that way. /proc/sub-thread-tid has
> > > > > >proc_tgid_base_operations despite not being a thread group leader.
> > > > > >(Yes, that's kinda weird.) AFAICS the WARN_ON_ONCE() in this code can
> > > > > >be hit trivially, and then the code will misbehave.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >@Joel: I think you'll have to either rewrite this to explicitly bail
> > > > > >out if you're dealing with a thread group leader, or make the code
> > > > > >work for threads, too.
> > > > > 
> > > > > The latter case probably being preferred if this API is supposed to be
> > > > > useable for thread management in userspace.
> > > > 
> > > > At the moment, we are not planning to use this for sub-thread management. I
> > > > am reworking this patch to only work on clone(2) pidfds which makes the above
> > > 
> > > Indeed and agreed.
> > > 
> > > > discussion about /proc a bit unnecessary I think. Per the latest CLONE_PIDFD
> > > > patches, CLONE_THREAD with pidfd is not supported.
> > > 
> > > Yes. We have no one asking for it right now and we can easily add this
> > > later.
> > > 
> > > Admittedly I haven't gotten around to reviewing the patches here yet
> > > completely. But one thing about using POLLIN. FreeBSD is using POLLHUP
> > > on process exit which I think is nice as well. How about returning
> > > POLLIN | POLLHUP on process exit?
> > > We already do things like this. For example, when you proxy between
> > > ttys. If the process that you're reading data from has exited and closed
> > > it's end you still can't usually simply exit because it might have still
> > > buffered data that you want to read.  The way one can deal with this
> > > from  userspace is that you can observe a (POLLHUP | POLLIN) event and
> > > you keep on reading until you only observe a POLLHUP without a POLLIN
> > > event at which point you know you have read
> > > all data.
> > > I like the semantics for pidfds as well as it would indicate:
> > > - POLLHUP -> process has exited
> > > - POLLIN  -> information can be read
> > 
> > Actually I think a bit different about this, in my opinion the pidfd should
> > always be readable (we would store the exit status somewhere in the future
> > which would be readable, even after task_struct is dead). So I was thinking
> 
> So your idea is that you always get EPOLLIN when the process is alive,
> i.e. epoll_wait() immediately returns for a pidfd that referes to a live
> process if you specify EPOLLIN? E.g. if I specify EPOLLIN | EPOLLHUP
> then epoll_wait() would constantly return. I would then need to check
> for EPOLLHUP, see that it is not present and then go back into the
> epoll_wait() loop and play the same game again?
> What do you need this for?

The approach of this patch is we would return EPOLLIN only once the process
exits. Until then it blocks.

> And if you have a valid reason to do this would it make sense to set
> POLLPRI if the actual exit status can be read? This way one could at
> least specify POLLPRI | POLLHUP without being constantly woken.
> 
> > we always return EPOLLIN.  If process has not exited, then it blocks.
> > 
> > However, we also are returning EPOLLERR in previous patch if the task_struct
> > has been reaped (task == NULL). I could change that to EPOLLHUP.
> 
> That would be here, right?:
> 
> > +	if (!task)
> > +		poll_flags = POLLIN | POLLRDNORM | POLLHUP;
> 
> That sounds better to me that EPOLLERR.

I see. Ok I agree with you. It is not really an error, because even though
the task_struct doesn't exist, the data such as exit status would still be
readable so IMO POLLHUP is better.