On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 10:59:17PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Dave McCracken wrote:
>
> > In looking at the code I was wondering something. What happens to the
> > real parent of a ptraced task when it calls wait4()? If that's its only
> > child, won't it return ECHILD?
>
> hm, so this could be fixed by iterating over the ptraced tasks as well
> when doing a wait4.
>
> the problem is that the debugger wants to do a wait4 as well, to receive
> the SIGSTOP result. Now if the original parent 'steals' the wait4 result,
> what will happen?
>
> this whole mess can only be fixed by decoupling the ptrace() mechanism
> from signals and wait4 completely, it's a nasty relationship that infests
> both the kernel and userspace code [check out strace.c once to see the
> kind of pain it has to go through to isolate ptrace events from other
> signals.]
>
> I'm not quite sure whether this is possible, how deeply do ptrace
> applications depend on a real SIGSTOP signal interrupting the task? Would
> it be equally good if it was a different interruption/signalling method
> that did this? [with a few minor and straightforward cleanups to entry.S i
> think we could use a task ornament flag for ptrace interruption. This
> would result in a few orders better behavior on all fronts.]
I have in my mailbox somewhere the beginnings of an implementation of
this, from David Howells (the ornaments approach); I think he ran out
of time to work on it. Rather than pursue it, if there's someone
interested in giving Linux a way to access at least some of the
Solaris/BSD procfs debug interface...
The biggest problem with ptrace is the way it overloads signals. It
makes figuring out what events are pretty tricky (see the patches I
just posted for some workarounds on this), and it makes debugging a
signal-intensive process extremely awkward. For instance, in a lot of
cases you'll lose or confuse the realtime payload entirely.
I don't think there is anything you could do here that would not break
strace/gdb's uses of ptrace, however; any incremental changes would
toast them.
-- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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