Re: [RFC PATCH] proc, pidns: Add highpid

On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 03:05:01PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

Pid reuse is common, which means that it's difficult or impossible
to read information about a pid from /proc without races.

This introduces a second number associated with each (task, pidns)
pair called highpid.  Highpid is a 64-bit number, and, barring
extremely unlikely circumstances or outright error, a (highpid, pid)
will never be reused.

With just this change, a program can open /proc/PID/status, read the
"Highpid" field, and confirm that it has the expected value.  If the
pid has been reused, then highpid will be different.

The initial implementation is straightforward: highpid is simply a
64-bit counter. If a high-end system can fork every 3 ns (which
would be amazing, given that just allocating a pid requires at
atomic operation), it would take well over 1000 years for highpid to
wrap.

For CRIU's benefit, the next highpid can be set by a privileged
user.

NB: The sysctl stuff only works on 64-bit systems.  If the approach
looks good, I'll fix that somehow.

Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <redacted>
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If this goes in, there's plenty of room to add new interfaces to
make this more useful.  For example, we could add a fancier tgkill
that adds and validates hightgid and highpid, and we might want to
add a syscall to read one's own hightgid and highpid.  These would
be quite useful for pidfiles.

David, would this be useful for kdbus?

CRIU people: will this be unduly difficult to support in CRIU?

Hi Andy. I think it won't be hard to support.