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  1. 01 Mar, 2024 1 commit
    • Christian Brauner's avatar
      pidfd: add pidfs · cb12fd8e
      Christian Brauner authored 
      This moves pidfds from the anonymous inode infrastructure to a tiny
pseudo filesystem. This has been on my todo for quite a while as it will
unblock further work that we weren't able to do simply because of the
very justified limitations of anonymous inodes. Moving pidfds to a tiny
pseudo filesystem allows:

* statx() on pidfds becomes useful for the first time.
* pidfds can be compared simply via statx() and then comparing inode
  numbers.
* pidfds have unique inode numbers for the system lifetime.
* struct pid is now stashed in inode->i_private instead of
  file->private_data. This means it is now possible to introduce
  concepts that operate on a process once all file descriptors have been
  closed. A concrete example is kill-on-last-close.
* file->private_data is freed up for per-file options for pidfds.
* Each struct pid will refer to a different inode but the same struct
  pid will refer to the same inode if it's opened multiple times. In
  contrast to now where each struct pid refers to the same inode. Even
  if we were to move to anon_inode_create_getfile() which creates new
  inodes we'd still be associating the same struct pid with multiple
  different inodes.

The tiny pseudo filesystem is not visible anywhere in userspace exactly
like e.g., pipefs and sockfs. There's no lookup, there's no complex
inode operations, nothing. Dentries and inodes are always deleted when
the last pidfd is closed.

We allocate a new inode for each struct pid and we reuse that inode for
all pidfds. We use iget_locked() to find that inode again based on the
inode number which isn't recycled. We allocate a new dentry for each
pidfd that uses the same inode. That is similar to anonymous inodes
which reuse the same inode for thousands of dentries. For pidfds we're
talking way less than that. There usually won't be a lot of concurrent
openers of the same struct pid. They can probably often be counted on
two hands. I know that systemd does use separate pidfd for the same
struct pid for various complex process tracking issues. So I think with
that things actually become way simpler. Especially because we don't
have to care about lookup. Dentries and inodes continue to be always
deleted.

The code is entirely optional and fairly small. If it's not selected we
fallback to anonymous inodes. Heavily inspired by nsfs which uses a
similar stashing mechanism just for namespaces.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240213-vfs-pidfd_fs-v1-2-f863f58cfce1@kernel.orgSigned-off-by: default avatarChristian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
      cb12fd8e
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