pid: make ENOMEM return value more obvious

The alloc_pid() codepath used to be simpler. With the introducation of the
ability to choose specific pids in 49cb2fc42c ("fork: extend clone3() to
support setting a PID") it got more complex. It hasn't been super obvious
that ENOMEM is returned when the pid namespace init process/child subreaper
of the pid namespace has died. As can be seen from multiple attempts to
improve this see e.g. [1] and most recently [2].
We regressed returning ENOMEM in [3] and [2] restored it. Let's add a
comment on top explaining that this is historic and documented behavior and
cannot easily be changed.

[1]: 35f71bc0a0 ("fork: report pid reservation failure properly")
[2]: b26ebfe12f ("pid: Fix error return value in some cases")
[3]: 49cb2fc42c ("fork: extend clone3() to support setting a PID")
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
This commit is contained in:
Christian Brauner 2020-03-08 14:29:17 +01:00
parent b26ebfe12f
commit 10dab84caf
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1 changed files with 8 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -247,6 +247,14 @@ struct pid *alloc_pid(struct pid_namespace *ns, pid_t *set_tid,
tmp = tmp->parent;
}
/*
* ENOMEM is not the most obvious choice especially for the case
* where the child subreaper has already exited and the pid
* namespace denies the creation of any new processes. But ENOMEM
* is what we have exposed to userspace for a long time and it is
* documented behavior for pid namespaces. So we can't easily
* change it even if there were an error code better suited.
*/
retval = -ENOMEM;
if (unlikely(is_child_reaper(pid))) {