Re: DoS with POSIX file locks?

[Trond Myklebust]

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 18:58 +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > Apps using LinuxThreads seem to be candidates:
> > > 
> > >      According to POSIX 1003.1c, a successful `exec*' in one of the
> > >      threads should automatically terminate all other threads in the
> > >      program.  This behavior is not yet implemented in LinuxThreads.
> > >      Calling `pthread_kill_other_threads_np' before `exec*' achieves
> > >      much of the same behavior, except that if `exec*' ultimately
> > >      fails, then all other threads are already killed.
> > > 
> > > steal_locks() was probably added as a workaround for this case, no?
> > 
> > Possibly, but LinuxThreads were never really POSIX thread compliant
> > anyway. Anyhow, the problem isn't really LinuxThreads, it is rather that
> > the existence of the standalone CLONE_FILES flag allows you to do a lot
> > of weird inheritance crap with 'posix locks' that the POSIX standards
> > committees never even had to consider.
> 
> Yes.  The execve-with-multiple-threads/posix-locks interaction is not
> documented for LinuxThreads but removing steal_locks() makes that
> implementation slighly differently incompatible to POSIX.  Some
> application _might_ be relying on the current behavior.

That really doesn't matter: the current behaviour isn't ever going to
work for some of the most commonly used Linux filesystems out there.
IOW: Such an application isn't even going to be portable from one Linux
installation to another.

Cheers,
  Trond

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