optimize posix_spawn to avoid spurious sigaction syscalls

the trick here is that sigaction can track for us which signals have
ever had a signal handler set for them, and only those signals need to
be considered for reset. this tracking mask may have false positives,
since it is impossible to remove bits from it without race conditions.
false negatives are not possible since the mask is updated with atomic
operations prior to making the sigaction syscall.

implementation-internal signals are set to SIG_IGN rather than SIG_DFL
so that a signal raised in the parent (e.g. calling pthread_cancel on
the thread executing pthread_spawn) does not have any chance make it
to the child, where it would cause spurious termination by signal.

this change reduces the minimum/typical number of syscalls in the
child from around 70 to 4 (including execve). this should greatly
improve the performance of posix_spawn and other interfaces which use
it (popen and system).

to facilitate these changes, sigismember is also changed to return 0
rather than -1 for invalid signals, and to return the actual status of
implementation-internal signals. POSIX allows but does not require an
error on invalid signal numbers, and in fact returning an error tends
to confuse applications which wrongly assume the return value of
sigismember is boolean.

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/src/process/posix_spawn.c b/src/process/posix_spawn.c
index c6886526..eb98f9f6 100644
--- a/src/process/posix_spawn.c
+++ b/src/process/posix_spawn.c
@@ -20,29 +20,43 @@ struct args {
 	char *const *argv, *const *envp;
 };
 
+void __get_handler_set(sigset_t *);
+
 static int child(void *args_vp)
 {
 	int i, ret;
-	struct sigaction sa;
+	struct sigaction sa = {0};
 	struct args *args = args_vp;
 	int p = args->p[1];
 	const posix_spawn_file_actions_t *fa = args->fa;
 	const posix_spawnattr_t *restrict attr = args->attr;
+	sigset_t hset;
 
 	close(args->p[0]);
 
 	/* All signal dispositions must be either SIG_DFL or SIG_IGN
 	 * before signals are unblocked. Otherwise a signal handler
 	 * from the parent might get run in the child while sharing
-	 * memory, with unpredictable and dangerous results. */
+	 * memory, with unpredictable and dangerous results. To
+	 * reduce overhead, sigaction has tracked for us which signals
+	 * potentially have a signal handler. */
+	__get_handler_set(&hset);
 	for (i=1; i<_NSIG; i++) {
-		__libc_sigaction(i, 0, &sa);
-		if (sa.sa_handler!=SIG_DFL && (sa.sa_handler!=SIG_IGN ||
-		    ((attr->__flags & POSIX_SPAWN_SETSIGDEF)
-		     && sigismember(&attr->__def, i) ))) {
+		if ((attr->__flags & POSIX_SPAWN_SETSIGDEF)
+		     && sigismember(&attr->__def, i)) {
 			sa.sa_handler = SIG_DFL;
-			__libc_sigaction(i, &sa, 0);
+		} else if (sigismember(&hset, i)) {
+			if (i-32<3U) {
+				sa.sa_handler = SIG_IGN;
+			} else {
+				__libc_sigaction(i, 0, &sa);
+				if (sa.sa_handler==SIG_IGN) continue;
+				sa.sa_handler = SIG_DFL;
+			}
+		} else {
+			continue;
 		}
+		__libc_sigaction(i, &sa, 0);
 	}
 
 	if (attr->__flags & POSIX_SPAWN_SETPGROUP)