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Message-ID: <20201026005028.GI534@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2020 20:50:29 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Status report and MT fork
I just pushed a series of changes (up through 0b87551bdf) I've had
queued for a while now, some of which had minor issues that I think
have all been resolved now. They cover a range of bugs found in the
process of reviewing the possibility of making fork provide a
consistent execution environment for the child of a multithreaded
parent, and a couple unrelated fixes.
Based on distro experience with musl 1.2.1, I'm working on getting the
improved fork into 1.2.2. Despite the fact that 1.2.1 did not break
anything that wasn't already broken (apps invoking UB in MT-forked
children), prior to it most of the active breakage was hit with very
low probability, so there were a lot of packages people *thought* were
working, that weren't, and feedback from distros seems to be that
getting everything working as reliably as before (even if it was
imperfect and dangerous before) is not tractable in any reasonable
time frame. And in particular, I'm concerned about language runtimes
like Ruby that seem to have a contract with applications they host to
support MT-forked children. Fixing these is not a matter of fixing a
finite set of bugs but fixing a contract, which is likely not
tractable.
Assuming it goes through, the change here will be far more complete
than glibc's handling of MT-forked children, where most things other
than malloc don't actually work, but fail sufficiently infrequently
that they seem to work. While there are a lot of things I dislike
about this path, one major thing I do like is that it really makes
internal use of threads by library code (including third party libs)
transparent to the application, rather than "transparent, until you
use fork".
Will follow up with draft patch for testing.
Rich
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