On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 3:55 AM, Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 9/28/17, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 27 September 2017 at 17:03, Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>>> The idea is to start process. In ideal world, only bynary system calls
>>>> would exist and shells could emulate /proc/* same way bash implement
>>>> /dev/tcp
>>>
>>> Then start the process by doing it for real and making it obviously
>>> useful. We should not add a pair of vaguely useful, rather weak
>>> syscalls just to start a process of modernizing /proc.
>
> Before doing it for real it would be nice to have at least a nod
> from people in charge that syscalls which return binary
> information are OK. Otherwise some EIATF guy will just say
> "NAK /proc is fine, it always was fine".
There's nothing inherently wrong with syscalls that return binary
information. There is something wrong with reinventing the world with
insufficient justification, though.
/proc may be old, clunky, and kind of slow, but it has a lot of good
things going for it. It supports access control (DAC and MAC). It
handles namespacing in a way that's awkward but supported by all the
existing namespace managers. It may soon support mount options, which
is rather important.
I feel like we've been discussing this performance issue for over a
year, and I distinctly recall discussing it in Santa Fe. I suggested
a two-pronged approach:
1. Add a new syscall that will, in a single call, open, read, and
close a proc file and maybe even a regular non-proc file. Like this:
long readfileat(int dirfd, const char *path, void *buf, size_t len, int flags);
2. Where needed, add new /proc files with lighter-weight
representations. I think we discussed something that's like status
but in nl_attr format.
This doesn't end up with a bunch of code duplication the way that a
full-blown syscall-based reimplementation would. It supports all the
/proc features rather than just a subset. It fully respects access
control, future mount options, and the potential lack of a /proc
mount.
>
> Or look from another angle: sched_setaffinity exists but there is
> no /proc counterpart, shells must use taskset(1) and world didn't end.
sched_setaffinity() modifies the caller. /proc wouldn't have made much sense.
>
>> I concur.
>>
>> Alexey, you still have not wxplained who specifically needs this
>> right now, and how, precisely, they plan to use the new system calls.
>> It is all very arm-wavey so far.
>
> It is not if you read even example program in the original patch.
> Any program which queries information about file descriptors
> will benefit both in CPU and memory usage.
>
> void closefrom(int start)
> {
> int fd[1024];
> int n;
>
> while ((n = fdmap(0, fd, sizeof(fd)/sizeof(fd[0]), start)) > 0) {
> unsigned int i;
>
> for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
> close(fd[i]);
>
> start = fd[n - 1] + 1;
> }
> }
>
> CRIU naturally to know everything about descriptors of target processes:
> It does:
>
> int predump_task_files(int pid)
> {
> struct dirent *de;
> DIR *fd_dir;
> int ret = -1;
>
> pr_info("Pre-dump fds for %d)\n", pid);
>
> fd_dir = opendir_proc(pid, "fd");
> if (!fd_dir)
> return -1;
>
> while ((de = readdir(fd_dir))) {
> if (dir_dots(de))
> continue;
>
> if (predump_one_fd(pid, atoi(de->d_name)))
> goto out;
> }
>
> ret = 0;
> out:
> closedir(fd_dir);
> return ret;
> }
>
> which is again inefficient.
And /proc/PID/fds would solve this.
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