The CLONE_PARENT flag cannot but used by init processes. Let's mention
this in the manpages to prevent surprises.
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
The introductory paragraphs note that "the calling process" is
normally synonymous with the "the parent process", except in the
case of CLONE_PARENT. The same is also true of CLONE_THREAD.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Advertise to userspace that they should use proper pid_t types
for arguments returning a pid.
The kernel-internal struct kernel_clone_args currently uses int
as type and since POSIX mandates that pid_t is a signed integer
type and glibc and friends use int this is not an issue. After
the merge window for v5.5 closes we can switch struct
kernel_clone_args over to using pid_t as well without any danger
in regressing current userspace.
Also note, that the new set tid feature which will be merged for
v5.5 uses pid_t types as well.
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
If mmap() fails it will return MAP_FAILED which according to the manpage
is (void *)-1 not NULL.
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Fix two spelling mistakes in manpage describing the clone{2,3}()
syscalls/syscall wrappers.
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Reword a little to allow for the fact that there are now
*two* reasons to consider using this flag.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Christian Brauner suggested mmap(MAP_STACKED), rather than
malloc(), as the canonical way of allocating a stack for the
child of clone(), and Jann Horn noted some reasons why:
Not on Linux, but on OpenBSD, they do use MAP_STACK now
AFAIK; this was announced here:
<http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/stack-register-checking-td338238.html>.
Basically they periodically check whether the userspace
stack pointer points into a MAP_STACK region, and if not,
they kill the process. So even if it's a no-op on Linux, it
might make sense to advise people to use the flag to improve
portability? I'm not sure if that's something that belongs
in Linux manpages.
Another reason against malloc() is that when setting up
thread stacks in proper, reliable software, you'll probably
want to place a guard page (in other words, a 4K PROT_NONE
VMA) at the bottom of the stack to reliably catch stack
overflows; and you probably don't want to do that with
malloc, in particular with non-page-aligned allocations.
And the OpenBSD 6.5 manual pages says:
MAP_STACK
Indicate that the mapping is used as a stack. This
flag must be used in combination with MAP_ANON and
MAP_PRIVATE.
And I then noticed that MAP_STACK seems already to be on
FreeBSD for a long time:
MAP_STACK
Map the area as a stack. MAP_ANON is implied.
Offset should be 0, fd must be -1, and prot should
include at least PROT_READ and PROT_WRITE. This
option creates a memory region that grows to at
most len bytes in size, starting from the stack
top and growing down. The stack top is the start‐
ing address returned by the call, plus len bytes.
The bottom of the stack at maximum growth is the
starting address returned by the call.
The entire area is reserved from the point of view
of other mmap() calls, even if not faulted in yet.
Reported-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Reported-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
The obsolete CLONE_DETACHED flag has never been properly
documented, but now the discussion CLONE_PIDFD also requires
mention of CLONE_DETACHED. So, properly document CLONE_DETACHED,
and mention its interactions with CLONE_PIDFD.
Reported-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Sometimes the descriptions of these flags mentioned the
corresponding section 7 namespace manual page and then the
required capabilities, and sometimes the order was the was
the reverse. Make it consistent.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Remove details of UTS, IPC, and network namespaces that are
already covered in the corresponding namespaces pages in
section 7. This change is for consistency, since corresponding
details were not provided for other namespace types in clone(2)
and these details do not appear in unshare(2).
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
After feedback from Christian Brauner [1], I've adjusted a few pieces
of the clone3() text, and also adjusted some of the older text in
the page.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/20191107151941.dw4gtul5lrtax4se@wittgenstein/
Reported-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Change the text in the introductory paragraph (which was written
20 years ago) to reflect the fact that clone*() does more things
nowadays.
Cowritten-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Adjust references to namespaces(7) to be references to pages
describing specific namespace types.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
For Q_QUOTAON, on old kernel we can use quotacheck -ug to generate
quota files. But in current kernel, we can also hide them in
system inodes and indicate them by using "quota" or project
feature.
For user or group quota, we can do as below (etc ext4):
mkfs.ext4 -F -o quota /dev/sda5
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
quotactl(QCMD(Q_QUOTAON, USRQUOTA), /dev/sda5, QFMT_VFS_V0, NULL);
For project quota, we can do as below (etc ext4):
mkfs.ext4 -F -o quota,project /dev/sda5
mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
quotactl(QCMD(Q_QUOTAON, PRJQUOTA), /dev/sda5, QFMT_VFS_V0, NULL);
Reported-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Yang Xu <xuyang2018.jy@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Use "flags mask" as a generic term to refer to the clone()
'flags' argument and the clone3() 'cl_args.flags' field.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Sometime soon, we'll have to add documentation of clone3() to this
page. As a preparatorys step, make the names of the clone()
arguments the same as the fields in the clone3() 'args' struct:
ctid ==> child_pid
ptid ==> parent_tid
newtls ==> tld
child_stack ==> stack
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
As noted in kernel commit 821cc7b0b205c0df64cce59aacc330af251fa8f7,
threads create an ambiguity: what if the calling process's PGID
is changed by another thread while waitpid(0, ...) is blocked?
So, clarify that waitpid(0, ...) means wait for children whose
PGID matches the caller's PGID at the time of the call to
waitpid().
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Since Linux 5.4, idtype == P_PGID && id == 0 can be used to wait
on children in same process group as caller.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Since kernel commit a9a08845e9acbd224e4ee466f5c1275ed50054e8, the
equivalence between select() and poll()/epoll is defined in terms
of the EPOLL* constants, rather than the POLL* constants.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Christian noted that SA_NOCLDWAIT also matters in this scenario.
Reported-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
After review comments from Christian and Daniel.
Reported-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Reported-by: Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Thus, pidfd_open() is the preferred way of obtaining a PID
file descriptor.
Notes from a conversation with Christian Brauner:
[[
> A further question... We now have three ways of getting a
> process file descriptor [*]:
>
> open() of /proc/PID
> pidfd_open()
> clone()/clone3() with CLONE_PIDFD
>
> I thought the FD was supposed to be equivalent in all three cases.
> However, if I try (on kernel 5.3) poll() an FD returned by opening
> /proc/PID, poll() tells me POLLNVAL for the FD. Is that difference
> intentional? (I am guessing it is not.)
It's intentional.
The short answer is that /proc/<pid> is a convenience for sending
signals.
The longer answer is that this stems from a heavy debate about what a
process file descriptor was supposed to be and some people pushing for
at least being able to use /proc/<pid> dirfds while ignoring security
problems as soon as you're talking about returning those fds from
clone(); not to mention the additional problems discovered when trying
to implementing this.
A "real" pidfd is one from CLONE_PIDFD or pidfd_open() and all features
such as exit notification, read, and other future extensions will only
be implemented on top of them.
As much as we'd have liked to get rid of two different file descriptor
types it doesn't hurt us much and is not that much different from what
we will e.g. see with fsinfo() in the new mount api which needs to work
on regular fds gotten via open()/openat() and mountfds gotten from
fsopen() and fspick(). The mountfds will also allow for advanced
operations that the other ones will not. There's even an argument to be
made that fds you will get from open()/openat() and openat2() are
different types since they have very different behavior; openat2()
returning fds that are non arbitrarily upgradable etc.
]]
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Notes from a conversation on linux-man@ with Christian Brauner:
[[
> [*} By the way, going forward, can we call these things
> "process FDs", rather than "PID FDs"? The API names are what
> they are, an that's okay, but these just as we have socket
> FDs that refer to sockets, directory FDs that refer to
> directories, and timer FDs that refer to timers, and so on,
> these are FDs that refer to *processes*, not "process IDs".
> It's a little thing, but I think the naming better, and
> it's what I propose to use in the manual pages.
The naming was another debate and we ended with this compromise.
I would just clarify that a pidfd is a process file descriptor. I
wouldn't make too much of a deal of hiding the shortcut "pidfd".
People are already using it out there in the wild and it's never
proven a good idea to go against accepted practice.
]]
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
In the kernel source (kernel/fork.c::copy_process()), there is:
pidfile = anon_inode_getfile("[pidfd]", &pidfd_fops, pid,
O_RDWR | O_CLOEXEC);
Reviewed-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Add an entry for CLONE_PIDFD. This flag is available starting
with kernel 5.2. If specified, a process file descriptor
("pidfd") referring to the child process will be returned in
the ptid argument.
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
After my rewriting, almost nothing of the original page remains,
so update the copyright. As the author, I'm relicensing to the
"verbatim" license most commonly used in man pages.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
The text stating that "pivot_root() may or may not change the
current root and the current working directory of any processes
or threads which use the old root directory" was written 19 years
ago, before the system call itself was even finalized in the
kernel. The implementation has never changed, and it won't
change in the future, since that would cause user-space breakage.
The existence of that text in DESCRIPTION, followed by qualifying
text stating what the implementation actually does (and has always
done) makes for confusing reading. Therefore, relegate this text
to a historical note in NOTES (so that readers with long memories
can see why the manual page was changed) and rework the text in
DESCRIPTION accordingly.
Reported-by: Philipp Wendler <ml@philippwendler.de>
Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Reported-by: Reid Priedhorsky <reidpr@lanl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Quoting Eric:
If we are going to be pedantic "filesystem" is really the
wrong concept here. The section about bind mount clarifies
it, but I wonder if there is a better term.
I think I would say: "new_root and put_old must not be on
the same mount as the current root."
I think using "mount" instead of "filesystem" keeps the
concepts less confusing.
As I am reading through this email and seeing text that is
trying to be precise and clear then hitting the term
"filesystem" is a bit jarring. pivot_root doesn't care a
thing for file systems. pivot_root only cares about mounts.
And by a "mount" I mean the thing that you get when you
create a bind mount or you call mount normally.
Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Philipp Wendler noted that the text on the restrictions for
'new_root' was slightly contradictory, and things could be
clarified and simplified by describing the restrictions on
'new_root' in one place.
Reported-by: Philipp Wendler <ml@philippwendler.de>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Remove the text that suggests that pivot_root() changes the root
directory and CWD of process that have directory and CWD on the
old root *filesystem*. Change "filesystem" to "directory".
Reported-by: Philipp Wendler <ml@philippwendler.de>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Christian Brauner