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authorLibravatar Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>2021-08-27 10:02:18 +0200
committerLibravatar Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2021-09-07 11:08:00 -0700
commit2d3491b117c6dd08e431acc3904a546c4304d276 (patch)
tree5756d6b6c8c05eaf4590e2f172ad603445692099 /Documentation/RelNotes/2.11.4.txt
parenttr2: do compiler enum check in trace2_collect_process_info() (diff)
downloadtgif-2d3491b117c6dd08e431acc3904a546c4304d276.tar.xz
tr2: log N parent process names on Linux
In 2f732bf15e6 (tr2: log parent process name, 2021-07-21) we started logging parent process names, but only logged all parents on Windows. on Linux only the name of the immediate parent process was logged. Extend the functionality added there to also log full parent chain on Linux. This requires us to lookup "/proc/<getppid()>/stat" instead of "/proc/<getppid()>/comm". The "comm" file just contains the name of the process, but the "stat" file has both that information, and the parent PID of that process, see procfs(5). We parse out the parent PID of our own parent, and recursively walk the chain of "/proc/*/stat" files all the way up the chain. A parent PID of 0 indicates the end of the chain. It's possible given the semantics of Linux's PID files that we end up getting an entirely nonsensical chain of processes. It could happen if e.g. we have a chain of processes like: 1 (init) => 321 (bash) => 123 (git) Let's assume that "bash" was started a while ago, and that as shown the OS has already cycled back to using a lower PID for us than our parent process. In the time it takes us to start up and get to trace2_collect_process_info(TRACE2_PROCESS_INFO_STARTUP) our parent process might exit, and be replaced by an entirely different process! We'd racily look up our own getppid(), but in the meantime our parent would exit, and Linux would have cycled all the way back to starting an entirely unrelated process as PID 321. If that happens we'll just silently log incorrect data in our ancestry chain. Luckily we don't need to worry about this except in this specific cycling scenario, as Linux does not have PID randomization. It appears it once did through a third-party feature, but that it was removed around 2006[1]. For anyone worried about this edge case raising PID_MAX via "/proc/sys/kernel/pid_max" will mitigate it, but not eliminate it. One thing we don't need to worry about is getting into an infinite loop when walking "/proc/*/stat". See 353d3d77f4f (trace2: collect Windows-specific process information, 2019-02-22) for the related Windows code that needs to deal with that, and [2] for an explanation of that edge case. Aside from potential race conditions it's also a bit painful to correctly parse the process name out of "/proc/*/stat". A simpler approach is to use fscanf(), see [3] for an implementation of that, but as noted in the comment being added here it would fail in the face of some weird process names, so we need our own parse_proc_stat() to parse it out. With this patch the "ancestry" chain for a trace2 event might look like this: $ GIT_TRACE2_EVENT=/dev/stdout ~/g/git/git version | grep ancestry | jq -r .ancestry [ "bash", "screen", "systemd" ] And in the case of naughty process names like the following. This uses perl's ability to use prctl(PR_SET_NAME, ...). See Perl/perl5@7636ea95c5 (Set the legacy process name with prctl() on assignment to $0 on Linux, 2010-04-15)[4]: $ perl -e '$0 = "(naughty\nname)"; system "GIT_TRACE2_EVENT=/dev/stdout ~/g/git/git version"' | grep ancestry | jq -r .ancestry [ "sh", "(naughty\nname)", "bash", "screen", "systemd" ] 1. https://grsecurity.net/news#grsec2110 2. https://lore.kernel.org/git/48a62d5e-28e2-7103-a5bb-5db7e197a4b9@jeffhostetler.com/ 3. https://lore.kernel.org/git/87o8agp29o.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/ 4. https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/7636ea95c57762930accf4358f7c0c2dec086b5e Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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