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* include cleanups: remove unused headers and add feature test macrosSzabolcs Nagy2013-12-123-2/+2
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* add missing va_end in execl* for correcness and static code analyzersSzabolcs Nagy2013-10-073-0/+3
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* fix new environment always being null with execleRich Felker2013-10-031-2/+1
| | | | | | | | the va_arg call for the argv[]-terminating null pointer was missing, so this pointer was being wrongly used as the environment pointer. issue reported by Timo Teräs. proposed patch slightly modified to simplify the resulting code.
* optimize posix_spawn to avoid spurious sigaction syscallsRich Felker2013-08-091-7/+21
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 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.
* fix missing errno from exec failure in posix_spawnRich Felker2013-08-091-0/+1
| | | | | failures prior to the exec attempt were reported correctly, but on exec failure, the return value contained junk.
* block signals during forkRich Felker2013-08-081-0/+3
| | | | | | | | | | | there are several reasons for this. some of them are related to race conditions that arise since fork is required to be async-signal-safe: if fork or pthread_create is called from a signal handler after the fork syscall has returned but before the subsequent userspace code has finished, inconsistent state could result. also, there seem to be kernel and/or strace bugs related to arrival of signals during fork, at least on some versions, and simply blocking signals eliminates the possibility of such bugs.
* debloat code that depends on /proc/self/fd/%d with shared functionRich Felker2013-08-021-3/+4
| | | | | | | I intend to add more Linux workarounds that depend on using these pathnames, and some of them will be in "syscall" functions that, from an anti-bloat standpoint, should not depend on the whole snprintf framework.
* make posix_spawn (and functions that use it) use CLONE_VFORK flagRich Felker2013-07-171-1/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | this is both a minor scheduling optimization and a workaround for a difficult-to-fix bug in qemu app-level emulation. from the scheduling standpoint, it makes no sense to schedule the parent thread again until the child has exec'd or exited, since the parent will immediately block again waiting for it. on the qemu side, as regular application code running on an underlying libc, qemu cannot make arbitrary clone syscalls itself without confusing the underlying implementation. instead, it breaks them down into either fork-like or pthread_create-like cases. it was treating the code in posix_spawn as pthread_create-like, due to CLONE_VM, which caused horribly wrong behavior: CLONE_FILES broke the synchronization mechanism, CLONE_SIGHAND broke the parent's signals, and CLONE_THREAD caused the child's exec to end the parent -- if it hadn't already crashed. however, qemu special-cases CLONE_VFORK and emulates that with fork, even when CLONE_VM is also specified. this also gives incorrect semantics for code that really needs the memory sharing, but posix_spawn does not make use of the vm sharing except to avoid momentary double commit charge. programs using posix_spawn (including via popen) should now work correctly under qemu app-level emulation.
* remove explicit locking to prevent __synccall setuid during posix_spawnRich Felker2013-04-261-13/+0
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | for the duration of the vm-sharing clone used by posix_spawn, all signals are blocked in the parent process, including implementation-internal signals. since __synccall cannot do anything until successfully signaling all threads, the fact that signals are blocked automatically yields the necessary safety. aside from debloating and general simplification, part of the motivation for removing the explicit lock is to simplify the synchronization logic of __synccall in hopes that it can be made async-signal-safe, which is needed to make setuid and setgid, which depend on __synccall, conform to the standard. whether this will be possible remains to be seen.
* remove cruft from pre-posix_spawn version of the system functionRich Felker2013-03-241-6/+0
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* consistently use the internal name __environ for environRich Felker2013-02-172-4/+4
| | | | | | | | | | | patch by Jens Gustedt. previously, the intended policy was to use __environ in code that must conform to the ISO C namespace requirements, and environ elsewhere. this policy was not followed in practice anyway, making things confusing. on top of that, Jens reported that certain combinations of link-time optimization options were breaking with the inconsistent references; this seems to be a compiler or linker bug, but having it go away is a nice side effect of the changes made here.
* base system() on posix_spawnRich Felker2013-02-031-41/+26
| | | | | this avoids duplicating the fragile logic for executing an external program without fork.
* fix unsigned comparison bug in posix_spawnRich Felker2013-02-031-1/+1
| | | | | | | read should never return anything but 0 or sizeof ec here, but if it does, we want to treat any other return as "success". then the caller will get back the pid and is responsible for waiting on it when it immediately exits.
* overhaul posix_spawn to use CLONE_VM instead of vforkRich Felker2013-02-033-55/+125
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | the proposed change was described in detail in detail previously on the mailing list. in short, vfork is unsafe because: 1. the compiler could make optimizations that cause the child to clobber the parent's local vars. 2. strace is buggy and allows the vforking parent to run before the child execs when run under strace. the new design uses a close-on-exec pipe instead of vfork semantics to synchronize the parent and child so that the parent does not return before the child has finished using its arguments (and now, also its stack). this also allows reporting exec failures to the caller instead of giving the caller a child that mysteriously exits with status 127 on exec error. basic testing has been performed on both the success and failure code paths. further testing should be done.
* fix up minor misplacement of restrict keyword in spawnattr sched stubsRich Felker2013-02-011-2/+2
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* add support for thread scheduling (POSIX TPS option)Rich Felker2012-11-111-0/+25
| | | | | | | | | | linux's sched_* syscalls actually implement the TPS (thread scheduling) functionality, not the PS (process scheduling) functionality which the sched_* functions are supposed to have. omitting support for the PS option (and having the sched_* interfaces fail with ENOSYS rather than omitting them, since some broken software assumes they exist) seems to be the only conforming way to do this on linux.
* clean up sloppy nested inclusion from pthread_impl.hRich Felker2012-11-081-0/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | this mirrors the stdio_impl.h cleanup. one header which is not strictly needed, errno.h, is left in pthread_impl.h, because since pthread functions return their error codes rather than using errno, nearly every single pthread function needs the errno constants. in a few places, rather than bringing in string.h to use memset, the memset was replaced by direct assignment. this seems to generate much better code anyway, and makes many functions which were previously non-leaf functions into leaf functions (possibly eliminating a great deal of bloat on some platforms where non-leaf functions require ugly prologue and/or epilogue).
* system is a cancellation pointRich Felker2012-10-281-0/+3
| | | | | | | | | | ideally, system would also be cancellable while running the external command, but I cannot find any way to make that work without either leaking zombie processes or introducing behavior that is far outside what the standard specifies. glibc handles cancellation by killing the child process with SIGKILL, but this could be unsafe in that it could leave the data being manipulated by the command in an inconsistent state.
* fix usage of locks with vforkRich Felker2012-10-192-2/+3
| | | | | | __release_ptc() is only valid in the parent; if it's performed in the child, the lock will be unlocked early then double-unlocked later, corrupting the lock state.
* fix parent-memory-clobber in posix_spawn (environ)Rich Felker2012-10-183-9/+17
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* overhaul system() and popen() to use vfork; fix various related bugsRich Felker2012-10-182-29/+49
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | since we target systems without overcommit, special care should be taken that system() and popen(), like posix_spawn(), do not fail in processes whose commit charges are too high to allow ordinary forking. this in turn requires special precautions to ensure that the parent process's signal handlers do not end up running in the shared-memory child, where they could corrupt the state of the parent process. popen has also been updated to use pipe2, so it does not have a fd-leak race in multi-threaded programs. since pipe2 is missing on older kernels, (non-atomic) emulation has been added. some silly bugs in the old code should be gone too.
* block uid/gid changes during posix_spawnRich Felker2012-10-151-0/+10
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | usage of vfork creates a situation where a process of lower privilege may momentarily have write access to the memory of a process of higher privilege. consider the case of a multi-threaded suid program which is calling posix_spawn in one thread while another thread drops the elevated privileges then runs untrusted (relative to the elevated privilege) code as the original invoking user. this untrusted code can then potentially modify the data the child process will use before calling exec, for example changing the pathname or arguments that will be passed to exec. note that if vfork is implemented as fork, the lock will not be held until the child execs, but since memory is not shared it does not matter.
* use vfork if possible in posix_spawnRich Felker2012-09-141-1/+3
| | | | | | vfork is implemented as the fork syscall (with no atfork handlers run) on archs where it is not available, so this change does not introduce any change in behavior or regression for such archs.
* use restrict everywhere it's required by c99 and/or posix 2008Rich Felker2012-09-069-18/+18
| | | | | | | | to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99 compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form [restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
* x86_64 vfork implementationRich Felker2012-02-061-0/+12
| | | | untested; should work.
* support vfork on i386Rich Felker2011-10-141-0/+14
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* make available a namespace-safe vfork, if supportedRich Felker2011-10-141-1/+4
| | | | this may be useful to posix_spawn..?
* fix various bugs in path and error handling in execvp/fexecveRich Felker2011-09-292-18/+29
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* fix various errors in function signatures/prototypes found by nszRich Felker2011-09-132-5/+8
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* add missing posix_spawnattr_init/destroy functionsRich Felker2011-09-132-0/+13
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* use weak aliases rather than function pointers to simplify some codeRich Felker2011-08-061-2/+8
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* ensure in fork that child gets its own new robust mutex listRich Felker2011-07-161-0/+1
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* fix backwards posix_spawn file action orderRich Felker2011-05-295-6/+10
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* add accidentally-omitted file needed for posix_spawn file actionsRich Felker2011-05-281-0/+10
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* add file actions support to posix_spawnRich Felker2011-05-285-2/+85
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* posix_spawn: honor POSIX_SPAWN_SETSIGDEF flagRich Felker2011-05-281-1/+3
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* initial implementation of posix_spawnRich Felker2011-05-2812-0/+151
| | | | | file actions are not yet implemented, but everything else should be mostly complete and roughly correct.
* correct variadic prototypes for execl* familyRich Felker2011-04-273-15/+18
| | | | | the old versions worked, but conflicted with programs which declared their own prototypes and generated warnings with some versions of gcc.
* fix minor bugs due to incorrect threaded-predicate semanticsRich Felker2011-04-201-1/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | | some functions that should have been testing whether pthread_self() had been called and initialized the thread pointer were instead testing whether pthread_create() had been called and actually made the program "threaded". while it's unlikely any mismatch would occur in real-world problems, this could have introduced subtle bugs. now, we store the address of the main thread's thread descriptor in the libc structure and use its presence as a flag that the thread register is initialized. note that after fork, the calling thread (not necessarily the original main thread) is the new main thread.
* clean up handling of thread/nothread mode, lockingRich Felker2011-04-171-1/+1
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* overhaul pthread cancellationRich Felker2011-04-172-12/+2
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | this patch improves the correctness, simplicity, and size of cancellation-related code. modulo any small errors, it should now be completely conformant, safe, and resource-leak free. the notion of entering and exiting cancellation-point context has been completely eliminated and replaced with alternative syscall assembly code for cancellable syscalls. the assembly is responsible for setting up execution context information (stack pointer and address of the syscall instruction) which the cancellation signal handler can use to determine whether the interrupted code was in a cancellable state. these changes eliminate race conditions in the previous generation of cancellation handling code (whereby a cancellation request received just prior to the syscall would not be processed, leaving the syscall to block, potentially indefinitely), and remedy an issue where non-cancellable syscalls made from signal handlers became cancellable if the signal handler interrupted a cancellation point. x86_64 asm is untested and may need a second try to get it right.
* speed up threaded forkRich Felker2011-04-121-2/+1
| | | | | | after fork, we have a new process and the pid is equal to the tid of the new main thread. there is no need to make two separate syscalls to obtain the same number.
* overhaul cancellation to fix resource leaks and dangerous behavior with signalsRich Felker2011-03-242-2/+14
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | this commit addresses two issues: 1. a race condition, whereby a cancellation request occurring after a syscall returned from kernelspace but before the subsequent CANCELPT_END would cause cancellable resource-allocating syscalls (like open) to leak resources. 2. signal handlers invoked while the thread was blocked at a cancellation point behaved as if asynchronous cancellation mode wer in effect, resulting in potentially dangerous state corruption if a cancellation request occurs. the glibc/nptl implementation of threads shares both of these issues. with this commit, both are fixed. however, cancellation points encountered in a signal handler will not be acted upon if the signal was received while the thread was already at a cancellation point. they will of course be acted upon after the signal handler returns, so in real-world usage where signal handlers quickly return, it should not be a problem. it's possible to solve this problem too by having sigaction() wrap all signal handlers with a function that uses a pthread_cleanup handler to catch cancellation, patch up the saved context, and return into the cancellable function that will catch and act upon the cancellation. however that would be a lot of complexity for minimal if any benefit...
* global cleanup to use the new syscall interfaceRich Felker2011-03-205-7/+7
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* make fork properly initialize the main thread in the child processRich Felker2011-03-091-0/+7
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* implement fexecveRich Felker2011-02-271-0/+10
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* add pthread_atfork interfaceRich Felker2011-02-181-3/+6
| | | | | | | | | note that this presently does not handle consistency of the libc's own global state during forking. as per POSIX 2008, if the parent process was threaded, the child process may only call async-signal-safe functions until one of the exec-family functions is called, so the current behavior is believed to be conformant even if non-ideal. it may be improved at some later time.
* initial check-in, version 0.5.0 v0.5.0Rich Felker2011-02-1212-0/+194