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changing credentials in a multi-threaded program is extremely
difficult on linux because it requires synchronizing the change
between all threads, which have their own thread-local credentials on
the kernel side. this is further complicated by the fact that changing
the real uid can fail due to exceeding RLIMIT_NPROC, making it
possible that the syscall will succeed in some threads but fail in
others.
the old __rsyscall approach being replaced was robust in that it would
report failure if any one thread failed, but in this case, the program
would be left in an inconsistent state where individual threads might
have different uid. (this was not as bad as glibc, which would
sometimes even fail to report the failure entirely!)
the new approach being committed refuses to change real user id when
it cannot temporarily set the rlimit to infinity. this is completely
POSIX conformant since POSIX does not require an implementation to
allow real-user-id changes for non-privileged processes whatsoever.
still, setting the real uid can fail due to memory allocation in the
kernel, but this can only happen if there is not already a cached
object for the target user. thus, we forcibly serialize the syscalls
attempts, and fail the entire operation on the first failure. this
*should* lead to an all-or-nothing success/failure result, but it's
still fragile and highly dependent on kernel developers not breaking
things worse than they're already broken.
ideally linux will eventually add a CLONE_USERCRED flag that would
give POSIX conformant credential changes without any hacks from
userspace, and all of this code would become redundant and could be
removed ~10 years down the line when everyone has abandoned the old
broken kernels. i'm not holding my breath...
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this is something of a tradeoff, as now set*id() functions, rather
than pthread_create, are what pull in the code overhead for dealing
with linux's refusal to implement proper POSIX thread-vs-process
semantics. my motivations are:
1. it's cleaner this way, especially cleaner to optimize out the
rsyscall locking overhead from pthread_create when it's not needed.
2. it's expected that only a tiny number of core system programs will
ever use set*id() functions, whereas many programs may want to use
threads, and making thread overhead tiny is an incentive for "light"
programs to try threads.
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