On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 12:31 PM Matthew Wilcox [off-list ref] wrote:

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 12:14:44PM -0800, Daniel Colascione wrote:

quoted

This change adds a per-pid-namespace 64-bit generation number,
incremented on PID rollover, and exposes it via a new proc file
/proc/pid_generation. By examining this file before and after /proc
enumeration, user code can detect the potential reuse of a PID and
restart the task enumeration process, repeating until it gets a
coherent snapshot.

PID rollover ought to be rare, so in practice, scan repetitions will
be rare.

Then why does it need to be 64-bit?

[Resending because of accidental HTML. I really need to switch to a
better email client.]

Because 64 bits is enough for anyone. :-) A u64 is big enough that
we'll never observe an overflow on a running system, and PID
namespaces are rare enough that we won't miss the four extra bytes we
use by upgrading from a u32.  And after reading about some security
problems caused by too-clever handling of 32-bit rollover, I'd rather
the code be obviously correct than save a trivial amount of space.