overhaul cancellation to fix resource leaks and dangerous behavior with signals
authorRich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:18:00 +0000 (14:18 -0400)
committerRich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>
Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:18:00 +0000 (14:18 -0400)
commitb470030f839a375e5030ec9d44903ef7581c15a2
tree462b1df89a3ea45bcf50b9d0a844472576ed6585
parent095820016689dfdc9141f477a86de22054c86078
overhaul cancellation to fix resource leaks and dangerous behavior with signals

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...
14 files changed:
arch/i386/pthread_arch.h
arch/x86_64/pthread_arch.h
src/internal/libc.h
src/process/waitid.c
src/process/waitpid.c
src/select/pselect.c
src/select/select.c
src/signal/sigsuspend.c
src/signal/sigtimedwait.c
src/termios/tcdrain.c
src/thread/pthread_cond_timedwait.c
src/thread/pthread_create.c
src/thread/sem_timedwait.c
src/time/nanosleep.c