Comment by loeg
1 day ago
> The things you can do between fork and exec are sometimes underestimated. Off the top of my head, you can call dup2(), you can set a process group id, probably a few other things.
What do you mean underestimated? You can do anything between fork and exec; there are no limitations.
That's not true. Just one example, if you do anything with threads you are pretty screwed. For example if another thread holds a mutex at the time of fork(2), and you also want that mutex.
You can create threads in forked children before exec. Nothing in the kernel prevents you from invoking clone().
You're talking about libc (glibc) implementation details now; userspace programs running on the Linux kernel do not have to be implemented in C or use glibc's primitives. Your earlier comment I initially replied to was talking about kernel syscalls. Forked processes are free to invoke any syscall they want, not just dup2 or a handful of others.
I'm not talking about glibc implementation details. I'm talking about how mixing fork(2) with threads creates harmful race conditions.
The forked child has only 1 thread in its process. If the parent's threads are holding a lock or are in the middle of mutating a shared data structure, you're fucked, because those threads are no longer running in your child's copy of the address space and will not finish their work. This issue is fundamental to how threads work and what fork(2) does.
3 replies →
Did you mean over-estimated?
That’s not true. man 7 signal-safety
You're talking about libc design choices, not constraints imposed by the kernel. To the kernel, a post-fork pre-exec process is just any old process. GP was suggesting post-fork processes were constrained in the syscalls they could invoke; they are not.
I did not say they are constrained in what syscalls they can make, as if some nanny at the syscall entry point will punish you for doing wrong. I said that it interacts poorly with threads due to inherent race conditions. See the other comment.
1 reply →