Skip to content
Commit 05d290d6 authored by Anders Kaseorg's avatar Anders Kaseorg Committed by Linus Torvalds
Browse files

fifo: Do not restart open() if it already found a partner



If a parent and child process open the two ends of a fifo, and the
child immediately exits, the parent may receive a SIGCHLD before its
open() returns.  In that case, we need to make sure that open() will
return successfully after the SIGCHLD handler returns, instead of
throwing EINTR or being restarted.  Otherwise, the restarted open()
would incorrectly wait for a second partner on the other end.

The following test demonstrates the EINTR that was wrongly thrown from
the parent’s open().  Change .sa_flags = 0 to .sa_flags = SA_RESTART
to see a deadlock instead, in which the restarted open() waits for a
second reader that will never come.  (On my systems, this happens
pretty reliably within about 5 to 500 iterations.  Others report that
it manages to loop ~forever sometimes; YMMV.)

  #include <sys/stat.h>
  #include <sys/types.h>
  #include <sys/wait.h>
  #include <fcntl.h>
  #include <signal.h>
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <unistd.h>

  #define CHECK(x) do if ((x) == -1) {perror(#x); abort();} while(0)

  void handler(int signum) {}

  int main()
  {
      struct sigaction act = {.sa_handler = handler, .sa_flags = 0};
      CHECK(sigaction(SIGCHLD, &act, NULL));
      CHECK(mknod("fifo", S_IFIFO | S_IRWXU, 0));
      for (;;) {
          int fd;
          pid_t pid;
          putc('.', stderr);
          CHECK(pid = fork());
          if (pid == 0) {
              CHECK(fd = open("fifo", O_RDONLY));
              _exit(0);
          }
          CHECK(fd = open("fifo", O_WRONLY));
          CHECK(close(fd));
          CHECK(waitpid(pid, NULL, 0));
      }
  }

This is what I suspect was causing the Git test suite to fail in
t9010-svn-fe.sh:

	http://bugs.debian.org/678852

Signed-off-by: default avatarAnders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Reviewed-by: default avatarJonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 1694a0a0
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment