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Danger of leaking file descriptors when spawning processes #12148

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alexcrichton opened this issue Feb 10, 2014 · 21 comments · Fixed by #24034
Closed

Danger of leaking file descriptors when spawning processes #12148

alexcrichton opened this issue Feb 10, 2014 · 21 comments · Fixed by #24034
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A-security Area: Security (example: address space layout randomization). I-needs-decision Issue: In need of a decision. P-medium Medium priority
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@alexcrichton
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We're not opening anything with CLOEXEC, so we're in theory leaking file descriptors across forks (they stay alive as long as the child stays alive).

We currently use getdtablesize to close all these descriptors, but as #12103 (comment) says, this isn't enough if a thread manually lowers RLIMIT_NOFILE.

We should consider opening file descriptors wherever possible with CLOEXEC, but this also sounds like it's a tricky situation (not always supported to specify the flag at open-time).

@ben0x539
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... but what if a forked process wants to hang on to existing file descriptors?

@alexcrichton
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#13790 has example code triggering this problem as well as some solutions for some platforms.

@thestinger thestinger added A-security Area: Security (example: address space layout randomization). I-nominated labels Sep 19, 2014
@thestinger
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Opening all file descriptors as CLOEXEC should be the default and can be fully implemented on both Linux and Windows. I don't know if this can be done with absolutely zero race conditions on OS X and FreeBSD (atomic operations rather than setting it after opening), but it's probably possible. This is a major security issue and has backwards compatibility implications.

@bnoordhuis
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FreeBSD 10, like Linux >= 26.27, has atomic O_CLOEXEC system calls. For other POSIX platforms, I imagine you could manually clean up in a pthread_atfork() handler, though that won't work for file descriptors > RLIMIT_NOFILE.

OS X has a POSIX_SPAWN_CLOEXEC_DEFAULT posix_spawnattr_t flag but that only helps when spawning a new process, not when you want to fork. You use posix_spawn_file_actions_addinherit_np() for file descriptors that the new process should inherit but that is complicated by the fact that it only accepts file descriptors < OPEN_MAX (10,240.)

@pnkfelix
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this issue should be considered blocking the stabilization of the relevant API's.

The relevant API's are not yet considered stable (they are currently experimental).

So, assigning P-high, not 1.0.

@pnkfelix pnkfelix added P-medium Medium priority and removed I-nominated labels Sep 25, 2014
@alexcrichton
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Closing in favor of rust-lang/rfcs#941

@thestinger
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This is a real, serious security issue and needs to be fixed regardless of whether a proposed redesign happens. Closing the issue doesn't change the fact that it's getting a CVE assigned if it's not fixed by 1.0.

@aturon
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aturon commented Mar 5, 2015

For the record, I'm worried about closing this out without a clear resolution for 1.0.

While I think the APIs for the new IO system are in good shape (and are quite conservative), I think we should take an additional pass through the implementation looking for issues like this, and try to document as much of the details as possible (i.e. what syscalls a given API maps to, and what promises we're making behavior-wise).

@pcwalton
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I worry people will rely on calling libc::fork() and we will not be able to change the behavior backwards compatibly. I was bitten by this in gaol so it is not a theoretical concern. I will nominate this.

@thestinger
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They leak whether or not you call fork because a loop up to the rlimit isn't enough. There's no guarantee that the file descriptors are allocated sequentially up to that limit - and in practice they won't be if a limit was applied even shortly after starting. It could also need to issue a million system calls as it's based on the assumption that the rlimit...

@l0kod
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l0kod commented Mar 11, 2015

To explicitly list all open file descriptors, we can replace the getdtablesize call with a listing of /proc/self/fd/* when available. This should be useful for external lib/FFI leaking file descriptors or for explicit fork (without execve) or if Rust miss something.
Moreover, this closing loop should not discriminate file descriptor by their number.

Anyway, O_CLOEXEC should be used everywhere in Rust.

cc #23233
cc #22797

@l0kod
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l0kod commented Mar 11, 2015

To explicitly list all open file descriptors, we can replace the getdtablesize call with a listing of /proc/self/fd/* when available.

This will also help to reduce the syscall storm when using Process::spawn :)

@pnkfelix
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1.0, P-backcompat-libs, I-needs-decision.

@pnkfelix pnkfelix added this to the 1.0 milestone Mar 12, 2015
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 21, 2019
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.

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).

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 21, 2019
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.

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).

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 21, 2019
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.

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)
{
        DIR *dir;
        struct dirent *direntp;

        dir = opendir("/proc/self/fd");
        if (!dir)
                return -1;

        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 == 0 || fd == 1 || fd == 2)
                        continue;
                close(fd);
        }

        closedir(dir); /* cannot fail */
        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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 22, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 22, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 23, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2:
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - make use of already existing helpers that allow to better implement
    close_range()
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 23, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2:
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - make use of already existing helpers that allow to better implement
    close_range()
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 23, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2: unchanged
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 23, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2: unchanged
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 24, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2: unchanged
v3:
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 24, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2: unchanged
v3:
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux1 that referenced this issue May 24, 2019
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.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
v1:
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
v2: unchanged
v3:
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/
brauner added a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Oct 7, 2019
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'm happy to announce that we've coordinated with FreeBSD developers (Cced
below). They are going to add the same syscall on FreeBSD once we have
merged our proposal.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Oct 7, 2019
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'm happy to announce that we've coordinated with FreeBSD developers (Cced
below). They are going to add the same syscall on FreeBSD once we have
merged our proposal.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Oct 7, 2019
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'm happy to announce that we've coordinated with FreeBSD developers (Cced
below). They are going to add the same syscall on FreeBSD once we have
merged our proposal.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Oct 25, 2019
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged
fengguang pushed a commit to 0day-ci/linux that referenced this issue Oct 28, 2019
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD has expressed interest in adding the same
syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this
syscall including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Kubilay Kocak <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Yury Selivanov <[email protected]>
Cc: Victor Stinner <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Jun 2, 2020
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged
fengguang pushed a commit to 0day-ci/linux that referenced this issue Jun 2, 2020
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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.
[7]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Jun 3, 2020
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged

/* v6 */
unchanged
- Christian Brauner <[email protected]>:
  - Update commit message to reflect recent changes in glibc.
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Jun 15, 2020
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged

/* v6 */
unchanged
- Christian Brauner <[email protected]>:
  - Update commit message to reflect recent changes in glibc.
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Jun 16, 2020
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've also coordinated with some FreeBSD developers who got in touch with
me (Cced below). FreeBSD intends to add the same syscall once we merged it.
Quite a bunch of projects in userspace are waiting on this syscall
including Python and systemd.

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/[email protected]/
[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]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
---
/* v2 */
- Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors
- Al Viro <[email protected]>:
  - add cond_resched() to yield cpu when closing a lot of file descriptors

/* v3 */
unchanged

/* v4 */
- Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>:
  - fix braino: s/max()/min()/

/* v5 */
unchanged

/* v6 */
unchanged
- Christian Brauner <[email protected]>:
  - Update commit message to reflect recent changes in glibc.
brauner pushed a commit to brauner/linux that referenced this issue Jun 16, 2020
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/[email protected]/
[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]: rust-lang/rust#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 <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <[email protected]>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
Cc: Kyle Evans <[email protected]>
Cc: Jann Horn <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Florian Weimer <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
facebook-github-bot pushed a commit to facebook/sapling that referenced this issue Sep 1, 2020
Summary:
The Rust upstream took the "set F_CLOEXEC on every opened file" approach and
provided no support for closing fds at spawn time to make spawn lightweight [1].

However, that does not play well in our case:
- On Windows:
  - stdin/stdout/stderr are not created by Rust, and inheritable by
    default (other process like `cargo`, or `dotslash` might leak them too).
  - a few other handles like "Null", "Afd" are inheritable. It's
    unclear how they get created, though.
  - Fortunately, files opened by Python or C in edenscm (ex. packfiles) seem to
    be not inheritable and do not require special handling.
- On Linux:
  - Files opened by Python or C are likely lack of F_CLOEXEC and need special
    handling.

Implement logic to close file handlers (or set F_CLOEXEC) explicitly.

[1]: rust-lang/rust#12148

Reviewed By: DurhamG

Differential Revision: D23124167

fbshipit-source-id: 32f3a1b9e3ae3a9475609df282151c9d6c4badd4
bors added a commit to rust-lang-ci/rust that referenced this issue Jul 25, 2022
complete raw identifier with "r#" prefix

Fix rust-lang#12148

Escape Names and Paths used in `insert_text`/`insert_snippet` while rendering the completion items.
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