Re: [PATCH v7 0/6] introduce PIDFD_SELF* sentinels

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2025 23:10:53 +0000 Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 10:53 PM Lorenzo Stoakes
> <lorenzo.stoakes@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > The above code sequence doesn't seem at all onerous.  I'm not
> > > understanding why it's worth altering the kernel to permit this little
> > > shortcut?
> >
> > In practice it adds quite a bit of overhead for something that whatever
> > mechanism is using the pidfd can avoid.
> >
> > It was specifically intended for a real case of utilising
> > process_madvise(), using the newly extended ability to batch _any_
> > madvise() operations for the current process, like:
> >
> >         if (process_madvise(PIDFD_SELF, iovec, 10, MADV_GUARD_INSTALL, 0)) {
> >             ... error handling ...
> >         }
> >
> > vs.
> >
> >         pid_t pid = getpid();
> >         int pidfd = pidfd_open(pid, PIDFD_THREAD);
> >
> >         if (pidfd < 0) {
> >            ... error handling ...
> >         }
> >
> >         if (process_madvise(PIDFD_SELF, iovec, 10, MADV_GUARD_INSTALL, 0)) {
> >            ... cleanup pidfd ...
> >            ... error handling ...
> >         }
> >
> >         ...
> >
> >         ... cleanup pidfd ...
> >
> > So in practice, it's actually a lot more ceremony and noise. Suren has been
> > working with this code in practice and found this to be useful.
> 
> It's also nice to add that people on the libc/allocator side should
> also appreciate skipping pidfd_open's reliability concerns (mostly,
> that RLIMIT_NOFILE Should Not(tm) ever affect thread spawning or a
> malloc[1]). Besides the big syscall reduction and nice speedup, that
> is.
> 
> [1] whether this is the already case is an exercise left to the
> reader, but at the very least we should not add onto existing problems

Thanks.

Could we please get all the above spelled out much more thoroughly in
the [0/n] description (aka Patch Series Sales Brochure)?