Re: [PATCH v2 1/4] pidfd: support PIDFD_NONBLOCK in pidfd_open()

On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 12:21:27PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:

Introduce PIDFD_NONBLOCK to support non-blocking pidfd file descriptors.

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. In the
following patch we will extend waitid() internally to support non-blocking
pidfds.

This introduces a new flag PIDFD_NONBLOCK that is equivalent to O_NONBLOCK.
This follows the same patterns we have for other (anon inode) file descriptors
such as EFD_NONBLOCK, IN_NONBLOCK, SFD_NONBLOCK, TFD_NONBLOCK and the same for
close-on-exec flags.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200811181236.GA18763@localhost/ (local)
Link: https://github.com/joshtriplett/async-pidfd
Cc: Kees Cook <redacted>
Cc: Sargun Dhillon <redacted>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Suggested-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <redacted>

Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>