Re: [PATCH] nextfd(2)

[KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>]

(4/3/12 8:01 PM), Al Viro wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 01, 2012 at 03:57:42PM +0300, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:
>> Currently there is no reliable way to close all opened file descriptors
>> (which daemons need and like to do):
>>
>> * dumb close(fd) loop is slow, upper bound is unknown and
>>    can be arbitrary large,
>>
>> * /proc/self/fd is unreliable:
>>    proc may be unconfigured or not mounted at expected place.
>>    Looking at /proc/self/fd requires opening directory
>>    which may not be available due to malicious rlimit drop or ENOMEM situations.
>>    Not opening directory is equivalent to dumb close(2) loop except slower.
>>
>> BSD added closefrom(fd) which is OK for this exact purpose but suboptimal
>> on the bigger scale. closefrom(2) does only close(2) (obviously :-)
>> closefrom(2) siletly ignores errors from close(2) which in theory is not OK
>> for userspace.
>>
>> So, don't add closefrom(2), add nextfd(2).
>
> Or unshare(CLONE_FILES_EMPTY) to steal an idea from rfork(2) (Plan 9 one,
> that is - I don't remember if its *BSD analog has that).  Basically, they
> allow 3 kinds of behaviour on clone(2) analog (and unshare(2) is part of
> the same thing there):
> 	1) share descriptor table with parent (default for rfork(2))
> 	2) copy descriptor table from parent (RFFDG is set in flags)
> 	3) give child an empty descriptor table (RFCFDG is set in flags)
> They have something similar for namespace, BTW - the same share/copy/clean
> triple.

Please remember why closefrom() have "from" argument. Almost all case, people
don't cloase fd 0,1,2 (rarely and 3).

If we add 2nd argument into unshare(CLONE_FILES_EMPTY), It become more ugly than
current nextfd proposal.