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SubjectRe: PID sequences
David S. Miller writes:
> Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 21:19:44 -0800 (PST)
> From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet-list-linux-kernel@arctic.org>
>
> I have a concern. Whether or not this is valid is for you folks to
> decide. Read the theory that describes apache 1.3's mod_unique_id
> <http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_unique_id.html>. Essentially I
> make an assumption that pid reuse is unlikely to occur within a
> single second. I'm sure I'm not the only one making this
> assumption (think Message-ID generation, tmp filename generation,
> yadda).
>
> If you can do this with 15-bit "random" pids that's great.
> Otherwise maybe pids have to go 31-bits. I didn't look at your
> scheme closely, but it didn't seem to be "random".
>
> Yes, there are some issues. Richard Henderson gave me some ideas last
> night. Here is what I have so far.
>
> I can just imagine some program caching the parent pid, the parent
> goes away (or changes, due to debugging for example), and the parent
> pid gets reused very quickly (very likely with my suggested
> algorithm). The child probes the parent by sending some harmless kill
> signal to it, poof, disaster.

That's a bad way of doing it in the first place. Instead:
if (getppid () == 1) my_parent_has_died ();

or:
ppid = getppid ();
if (getppid () != ppid) my_parent_has_died ();

> Solution involves some changes, which I think on the whole should not
> add too much of a performance hit, and perhaps will still perform
> significantly better than what we have right now.

If the above "problem" is the only one, then I don't see why there is
a need to bother. There is a safe way to probe for parent death that
will work with your PID allocation scheme.

Regards,

Richard....

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