Re: [PATCH v2 2/4] exit: support non-blocking pidfds

[Christian Brauner]

On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 04:56:59PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 12:21:28PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > Passing a non-blocking pidfd to waitid() currently has no effect, i.e.  is not
> > supported. There are users which would like to use waitid() on pidfds that are
> > O_NONBLOCK and mix it with pidfds that are blocking and both pass them to
> > waitid().
> > The expected behavior is to have waitid() return -EAGAIN for non-blocking
> > pidfds and to block for blocking pidfds without needing to perform any
> > additional checks for flags set on the pidfd before passing it to waitid().
> > Non-blocking pidfds will return EAGAIN from waitid() when no child process is
> > ready yet. Returning -EAGAIN for non-blocking pidfds makes it easier for event
> > loops that handle EAGAIN specially.
> > 
> > It also makes the API more consistent and uniform. In essence, waitid() is
> > treated like a read on a non-blocking pidfd or a recvmsg() on a non-blocking
> > socket.
> > With the addition of support for non-blocking pidfds we support the same
> > functionality that sockets do. For sockets() recvmsg() supports MSG_DONTWAIT
> > for pidfds waitid() supports WNOHANG. Both flags are per-call options. In
> > contrast non-blocking pidfds and non-blocking sockets are a setting on an open
> > file description affecting all threads in the calling process as well as other
> > processes that hold file descriptors referring to the same open file
> > description. Both behaviors, per call and per open file description, have
> > genuine use-cases.
> > 
> > The implementation should be straightforward, we simply raise the WNOHANG flag
> > when a non-blocking pidfd is passed and when do_wait() returns without finding
> > an eligible task and the pidfd is non-blocking we set EAGAIN.  If no child
> > process exists non-blocking pidfd users will continue to see ECHILD but if
> > child processes exist but have not yet exited users will see EAGAIN.
> > 
> > A concrete use-case that was brought on-list was Josh's async pidfd library.
> > Ever since the introduction of pidfds and more advanced async io various
> > programming languages such as Rust have grown support for async event
> > libraries. These libraries are created to help build epoll-based event loops
> > around file descriptors. A common pattern is to automatically make all file
> > descriptors they manage to O_NONBLOCK.
> > 
> > For such libraries the EAGAIN error code is treated specially. When a function
> > is called that returns EAGAIN the function isn't called again until the event
> > loop indicates the the file descriptor is ready.  Supporting EAGAIN when
> > waiting on pidfds makes such libraries just work with little effort.
> > 
> > Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200811181236.GA18763@localhost/
> > Link: https://github.com/joshtriplett/async-pidfd
> > Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Sargun Dhillon <sargun@xxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Cc: "Peter Zijlstra (Intel)" <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Suggested-by: Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> With or without the discussed change to WNOHANG behavior for
> compatibility:
> Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

I think that WNOHANG compatibility change might be a good idea. So I've
changed this to:

	ret = do_wait(&wo);
	if (!ret && !(options & WNOHANG) && (f_flags & O_NONBLOCK))
		ret = -EAGAIN;

> 
> Also, I think you should flip the order of patches 1 and 2, so that
> there isn't a one-patch window in kernel history where you can create an
> O_NONBLOCK pidfd with pidfd_open but it has no effect. I'd expect
> userspace to use pidfd_open accepting or EINVAL-ing the flag as an
> indication of whether it'll work.

Good point! I've changed the order now.

Thanks!
Christian