if the last thread exited via pthread_exit, the logic that marked it
dead did not account for the possibility of it targeting itself via
atexit handlers. for example, an atexit handler calling
pthread_kill(pthread_self(), SIGKILL) would return success
(previously, ESRCH) rather than causing termination via the signal.
move the release of killlock after the determination is made whether
the exiting thread is the last thread. in the case where it's not,
move the release all the way to the end of the function. this way we
can clear the tid rather than spending storage on a dedicated
dead-flag. clearing the tid is also preferable in that it hardens
against inadvertent use of the value after the thread has terminated
but before it is joined.
posix documents in the rationale and future directions for
pthread_kill that, since the lifetime of the thread id for a joinable
thread lasts until it is joined, ESRCH is not a correct error for
pthread_kill to produce when the target thread has exited but not yet
been joined, and that conforming applications cannot attempt to detect
this state. future versions of the standard may explicitly require
that ESRCH not be returned for this case.
In some places there has been a direct usage of the functions. Use the
macros consistently everywhere, such that it might be easier later on to
capture the fast path directly inside the macro and only have the call
overhead on the slow path.
the main motivation for this change is to remove the assumption that
the tid of the main thread is also the pid of the process. (the value
returned by the set_tid_address syscall was used to fill both fields
despite it semantically being the tid.) this is historically and
presently true on linux and unlikely to change, but it conceivably
could be false on other systems that otherwise reproduce the linux
syscall api/abi.
only a few parts of the code were actually still using the cached pid.
in a couple places (aio and synccall) it was a minor optimization to
avoid a syscall. caching could be reintroduced, but lazily as part of
the public getpid function rather than at program startup, if it's
deemed important for performance later. in other places (cancellation
and pthread_kill) the pid was completely unnecessary; the tkill
syscall can be used instead of tgkill. this is actually a rather
subtle issue, since tgkill is supposedly a solution to race conditions
that can affect use of tkill. however, as documented in the commit
message for commit 7779dbd266, tgkill
does not actually solve this race; it just limits it to happening
within one process rather than between processes. we use a lock that
avoids the race in pthread_kill, and the use in the cancellation
signal handler is self-targeted and thus not subject to tid reuse
races, so both are safe regardless of which syscall (tgkill or tkill)
is used.
these could have caused memory corruption due to invalid accesses to
the next field. all should be fixed now; I found the errors with fgrep
-r '__lock(&', which is bogus since the argument should be an array.
if thread id was reused by the kernel between the time pthread_kill
read it from the userspace pthread_t object and the time of the tgkill
syscall, a signal could be sent to the wrong thread. the tgkill
syscall was supposed to prevent this race (versus the old tkill
syscall) but it can't; it can only help in the case where the tid is
reused in a different process, but not when the tid is reused in the
same process.
the only solution i can see is an extra lock to prevent threads from
exiting while another thread is trying to pthread_kill them. it should
be very very cheap in the non-contended case.
with this patch, the syscallN() functions are no longer needed; a
variadic syscall() macro allows syscalls with anywhere from 0 to 6
arguments to be made with a single macro name. also, manually casting
each non-integer argument with (long) is no longer necessary; the
casts are hidden in the macros.
some source files which depended on being able to define the old macro
SYSCALL_RETURNS_ERRNO have been modified to directly use __syscall()
instead of syscall(). references to SYSCALL_SIGSET_SIZE and SYSCALL_LL
have also been changed.
x86_64 has not been tested, and may need a follow-up commit to fix any
minor bugs/oversights.
Rich Felker