tree 1a3b571782988d933eb66b109f1b0d662b495bdf
parent b3a9e3b9622ae10064826dccb4f7a52bd88c7407
author Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> 1558690234 +0200
committer Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> 1592345119 +0200
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open: add close_range()

This adds the close_range() syscall. It allows to efficiently close a range
of file descriptors up to all file descriptors of a calling task.

I was contacted by FreeBSD as they wanted to have the same close_range()
syscall as we proposed here. We've coordinated this and in the meantime, Kyle
was fast enough to merge close_range() into FreeBSD already in April:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21627
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=359836
and the current plan is to backport close_range() to FreeBSD 12.2 (cf. [2])
once its merged in Linux too. Python is in the process of switching to
close_range() on FreeBSD and they are waiting on us to merge this to switch on
Linux as well: https://bugs.python.org/issue38061

The syscall came up in a recent discussion around the new mount API and
making new file descriptor types cloexec by default. During this
discussion, Al suggested the close_range() syscall (cf. [1]). Note, a
syscall in this manner has been requested by various people over time.

First, it helps to close all file descriptors of an exec()ing task. This
can be done safely via (quoting Al's example from [1] verbatim):

        /* that exec is sensitive */
        unshare(CLONE_FILES);
        /* we don't want anything past stderr here */
        close_range(3, ~0U);
        execve(....);

The code snippet above is one way of working around the problem that file
descriptors are not cloexec by default. This is aggravated by the fact that
we can't just switch them over without massively regressing userspace. For
a whole class of programs having an in-kernel method of closing all file
descriptors is very helpful (e.g. demons, service managers, programming
language standard libraries, container managers etc.).
(Please note, unshare(CLONE_FILES) should only be needed if the calling
task is multi-threaded and shares the file descriptor table with another
thread in which case two threads could race with one thread allocating file
descriptors and the other one closing them via close_range(). For the
general case close_range() before the execve() is sufficient.)

Second, it allows userspace to avoid implementing closing all file
descriptors by parsing through /proc/<pid>/fd/* and calling close() on each
file descriptor. From looking at various large(ish) userspace code bases
this or similar patterns are very common in:
- service managers (cf. [4])
- libcs (cf. [6])
- container runtimes (cf. [5])
- programming language runtimes/standard libraries
  - Python (cf. [2])
  - Rust (cf. [7], [8])
As Dmitry pointed out there's even a long-standing glibc bug about missing
kernel support for this task (cf. [3]).
In addition, the syscall will also work for tasks that do not have procfs
mounted and on kernels that do not have procfs support compiled in. In such
situations the only way to make sure that all file descriptors are closed
is to call close() on each file descriptor up to UINT_MAX or RLIMIT_NOFILE,
OPEN_MAX trickery (cf. comment [8] on Rust).

The performance is striking. For good measure, comparing the following
simple close_all_fds() userspace implementation that is essentially just
glibc's version in [6]:

static int close_all_fds(void)
{
        int dir_fd;
        DIR *dir;
        struct dirent *direntp;

        dir = opendir("/proc/self/fd");
        if (!dir)
                return -1;
        dir_fd = dirfd(dir);
        while ((direntp = readdir(dir))) {
                int fd;
                if (strcmp(direntp->d_name, ".") == 0)
                        continue;
                if (strcmp(direntp->d_name, "..") == 0)
                        continue;
                fd = atoi(direntp->d_name);
                if (fd == dir_fd || fd == 0 || fd == 1 || fd == 2)
                        continue;
                close(fd);
        }
        closedir(dir);
        return 0;
}

to close_range() yields:
1. closing 4 open files:
   - close_all_fds(): ~280 us
   - close_range():    ~24 us

2. closing 1000 open files:
   - close_all_fds(): ~5000 us
   - close_range():   ~800 us

close_range() is designed to allow for some flexibility. Specifically, it
does not simply always close all open file descriptors of a task. Instead,
callers can specify an upper bound.
This is e.g. useful for scenarios where specific file descriptors are
created with well-known numbers that are supposed to be excluded from
getting closed.
For extra paranoia close_range() comes with a flags argument. This can e.g.
be used to implement extension. Once can imagine userspace wanting to stop
at the first error instead of ignoring errors under certain circumstances.
There might be other valid ideas in the future. In any case, a flag
argument doesn't hurt and keeps us on the safe side.

From an implementation side this is kept rather dumb. It saw some input
from David and Jann but all nonsense is obviously my own!
- Errors to close file descriptors are currently ignored. (Could be changed
  by setting a flag in the future if needed.)
- __close_range() is a rather simplistic wrapper around __close_fd().
  My reasoning behind this is based on the nature of how __close_fd() needs
  to release an fd. But maybe I misunderstood specifics:
  We take the files_lock and rcu-dereference the fdtable of the calling
  task, we find the entry in the fdtable, get the file and need to release
  files_lock before calling filp_close().
  In the meantime the fdtable might have been altered so we can't just
  retake the spinlock and keep the old rcu-reference of the fdtable
  around. Instead we need to grab a fresh reference to the fdtable.
  If my reasoning is correct then there's really no point in fancyfying
  __close_range(): We just need to rcu-dereference the fdtable of the
  calling task once to cap the max_fd value correctly and then go on
  calling __close_fd() in a loop.

/* References */
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190516165021.GD17978@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[2]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/9e4f2f3a6b8ee995c365e86d976937c141d867f8/Modules/_posixsubprocess.c#L220
[3]: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10353#c7
[4]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/5238e9575906297608ff802a27e2ff9effa3b338/src/basic/fd-util.c#L217
[5]: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/blob/ddf4b77e11a4d08f09b7b9cd13e593f8c047edc5/src/lxc/start.c#L236
[6]: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/grantpt.c;h=2030e07fa6e652aac32c775b8c6e005844c3c4eb;hb=HEAD#l17
     Note that this is an internal implementation that is not exported.
     Currently, libc seems to not provide an exported version of this
     because of missing kernel support to do this.
     Note, in a recent patch series Florian made grantpt() a nop thereby
     removing the code referenced here.
[7]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/12148
[8]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/5f47c0613ed4eb46fca3633c1297364c09e5e451/src/libstd/sys/unix/process2.rs#L303-L308
     Rust's solution is slightly different but is equally unperformant.
     Rust calls getdtablesize() which is a glibc library function that
     simply returns the current RLIMIT_NOFILE or OPEN_MAX values. Rust then
     goes on to call close() on each fd. That's obviously overkill for most
     tasks. Rarely, tasks - especially non-demons - hit RLIMIT_NOFILE or
     OPEN_MAX.
     Let's be nice and assume an unprivileged user with RLIMIT_NOFILE set
     to 1024. Even in this case, there's a very high chance that in the
     common case Rust is calling the close() syscall 1021 times pointlessly
     if the task just has 0, 1, and 2 open.

Suggested-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Kyle Evans <self@kyle-evans.net>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <ldv@altlinux.org>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org