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* fix public clone function to be safe and usable by applicationsRich Felker2023-06-011-0/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | the clone() function has been effectively unusable since it was added, due to producing a child process with inconsistent state. in particular, the child process's thread structure still contains the tid, thread list pointers, thread count, and robust list for the parent. this will cause malfunction in interfaces that attempt to use the tid or thread list, some of which are specified to be async-signal-safe. this patch attempts to make clone() consistent in a _Fork-like sense. as in _Fork, when the parent process is multi-threaded, the child process inherits an async-signal context where it cannot call AS-unsafe functions, but its context is now intended to be safe for calling AS-safe functions. making clone fork-like would also be a future option, if it turns out that this is what makes sense to applications, but it's not done at this time because the changes would be more invasive. in the case where the CLONE_VM flag is used, clone is only vfork-like, not _Fork-like. in particular, the child will see itself as having the parent's tid, and cannot safely call any libc functions but one of the exec family or _exit. handling of flags and variadic arguments is also changed so that arguments are only consumed with flags that indicate their presence, and so that flags which produce an inconsistent state are disallowed (reported as EINVAL). in particular, all libc functions carry a contract that they are only callable with ABI requirements met, which includes having a valid thread pointer to a thread structure that's unique within the process, and whose contents are opaque and only able to be setup internally by the implementation. the only way for an application to use flags that violate these requirements without executing any libc code is to perform the syscall from application-provided asm.
* fix missing synchronization of pthread TSD keys with MT-forkRich Felker2022-10-191-0/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | commit 167390f05564e0a4d3fcb4329377fd7743267560 seems to have overlooked the presence of a lock here, probably because it was one of the exceptions not using LOCK() but a rwlock. as such, it can't be added to the generic table of locks to take, so add an explicit atfork function for the pthread keys table. the order it is called does not particularly matter since nothing else in libc but pthread_exit interacts with keys.
* fix potential deadlock in dlerror buffer handling at thread exitRich Felker2022-10-191-1/+0
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ever since commit 8f11e6127fe93093f81a52b15bb1537edc3fc8af introduced the thread list lock, this has been wrong. initially, it was wrong via calling free from the context with the thread list lock held. commit aa5a9d15e09851f7b4a1668e9dbde0f6234abada deferred the unsafe free but added a lock, which was also unsafe. in particular, it could deadlock if code holding freebuf_queue_lock was interrupted by a signal handler that takes the thread list lock. commit 4d5aa20a94a2d3fae3e69289dc23ecafbd0c16c4 observed that there was a lock here but failed to notice that it's invalid. there is no easy solution to this problem with locks; any attempt at solving it while still using locks would require the lock to be an AS-safe one (blocking signals on each access to the dlerror buffer list to check if there's deferred free work to be done) which would be excessively costly, and there are also lock order considerations with respect to how the lock would be handled at fork. instead, just use an atomic list.
* lift child restrictions after multi-threaded forkRich Felker2020-11-111-0/+19
as the outcome of Austin Group tracker issue #62, future editions of POSIX have dropped the requirement that fork be AS-safe. this allows but does not require implementations to synchronize fork with internal locks and give forked children of multithreaded parents a partly or fully unrestricted execution environment where they can continue to use the standard library (per POSIX, they can only portably use AS-safe functions). up until recently, taking this allowance did not seem desirable. however, commit 8ed2bd8bfcb4ea6448afb55a941f4b5b2b0398c0 exposed the extent to which applications and libraries are depending on the ability to use malloc and other non-AS-safe interfaces in MT-forked children, by converting latent very-low-probability catastrophic state corruption into predictable deadlock. dealing with the fallout has been a huge burden for users/distros. while it looks like most of the non-portable usage in applications could be fixed given sufficient effort, at least some of it seems to occur in language runtimes which are exposing the ability to run unrestricted code in the child as part of the contract with the programmer. any attempt at fixing such contracts is not just a technical problem but a social one, and is probably not tractable. this patch extends the fork function to take locks for all libc singletons in the parent, and release or reset those locks in the child, so that when the underlying fork operation takes place, the state protected by these locks is consistent and ready for the child to use. locking is skipped in the case where the parent is single-threaded so as not to interfere with legacy AS-safety property of fork in single-threaded programs. lock order is mostly arbitrary, but the malloc locks (including bump allocator in case it's used) must be taken after the locks on any subsystems that might use malloc, and non-AS-safe locks cannot be taken while the thread list lock is held, imposing a requirement that it be taken last.