cgroup: introduce cgroup.kill
Introduce the cgroup.kill file. It does what it says on the tin and allows a caller to kill a cgroup by writing "1" into cgroup.kill. The file is available in non-root cgroups. Killing cgroups is a process directed operation, i.e. the whole thread-group is affected. Consequently trying to write to cgroup.kill in threaded cgroups will be rejected and EOPNOTSUPP returned. This behavior aligns with cgroup.procs where reads in threaded-cgroups are rejected with EOPNOTSUPP. The cgroup.kill file is write-only since killing a cgroup is an event not which makes it different from e.g. freezer where a cgroup transitions between the two states. As with all new cgroup features cgroup.kill is recursive by default. Killing a cgroup is protected against concurrent migrations through the cgroup mutex. To protect against forkbombs and to mitigate the effect of racing forks a new CGRP_KILL css set lock protected flag is introduced that is set prior to killing a cgroup and unset after the cgroup has been killed. We can then check in cgroup_post_fork() where we hold the css set lock already whether the cgroup is currently being killed. If so we send the child a SIGKILL signal immediately taking it down as soon as it returns to userspace. To make the killing of the child semantically clean it is killed after all cgroup attachment operations have been finalized. There are various use-cases of this interface: - Containers usually have a conservative layout where each container usually has a delegated cgroup. For such layouts there is a 1:1 mapping between container and cgroup. If the container in addition uses a separate pid namespace then killing a container usually becomes a simple kill -9 <container-init-pid> from an ancestor pid namespace. However, there are quite a few scenarios where that isn't true. For example, there are containers that share the cgroup with other processes on purpose that are supposed to be bound to the lifetime of the container but are not in the same pidns of the container. Containers that are in a delegated cgroup but share the pid namespace with the host or other containers. - Service managers such as systemd use cgroups to group and organize processes belonging to a service. They usually rely on a recursive algorithm now to kill a service. With cgroup.kill this becomes a simple write to cgroup.kill. - Userspace OOM implementations can make good use of this feature to efficiently take down whole cgroups quickly. - The kill program can gain a new kill --cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/delegated flag to take down cgroups. A few observations about the semantics: - If parent and child are in the same cgroup and CLONE_INTO_CGROUP is not specified we are not taking cgroup mutex meaning the cgroup can be killed while a process in that cgroup is forking. If the kill request happens right before cgroup_can_fork() and before the parent grabs its siglock the parent is guaranteed to see the pending SIGKILL. In addition we perform another check in cgroup_post_fork() whether the cgroup is being killed and is so take down the child (see above). This is robust enough and protects gainst forkbombs. If userspace really really wants to have stricter protection the simple solution would be to grab the write side of the cgroup threadgroup rwsem which will force all ongoing forks to complete before killing starts. We concluded that this is not necessary as the semantics for concurrent forking should simply align with freezer where a similar check as cgroup_post_fork() is performed. For all other cases CLONE_INTO_CGROUP is required. In this case we will grab the cgroup mutex so the cgroup can't be killed while we fork. Once we're done with the fork and have dropped cgroup mutex we are visible and will be found by any subsequent kill request. - We obviously don't kill kthreads. This means a cgroup that has a kthread will not become empty after killing and consequently no unpopulated event will be generated. The assumption is that kthreads should be in the root cgroup only anyway so this is not an issue. - We skip killing tasks that already have pending fatal signals. - Freezer doesn't care about tasks in different pid namespaces, i.e. if you have two tasks in different pid namespaces the cgroup would still be frozen. The cgroup.kill mechanism consequently behaves the same way, i.e. we kill all processes and ignore in which pid namespace they exist. - If the caller is located in a cgroup that is killed the caller will obviously be killed as well. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210503143922.3093755-1-brauner@kernel.org Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Cc: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com> Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Cc: cgroups@vger.kernel.org Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com> Reviewed-by: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com> Acked-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com> Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
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