Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: Pthreads, linux, gdb, oh my! (and ptrace must die!) | From | Mike Coleman <> | Date | 13 Dec 2000 17:16:52 -0600 |
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Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl> writes: > However, the "zombie problem" is caused by the way ptrace() interacts > with clone()/exit()/wait(), which I consider to be a kernel bug. [insightful analysis omitted]
I think you've hit the nail on the head, and I'm a bit frustrated that I never noticed this problem even though I've spent quite a bit of time poring over the code that makes ptrace work.
My limited mental abilities notwithstanding, I think this is one more reason to ditch ptrace for a better method of process tracing/control. It's served up to this point, but ptrace has a fundamental flaw, which is that it tries to do a lot of interprocess signalling and interlocking in an in-band way, doing process reparenting to try to take advantage of existing code. In the end this seems to be resulting in an inscrutable, flaky mess.
What would a better process tracing facility be like? One key feature is utter transparency. That is, it should be impossible for traced processes or other processes that interact with them to be aware of whether or not tracing is going on. This means that there should be no difference between the way a process behaves under tracing versus how it would behave if it weren't being traced, which is a key to faithful tracing/debugging and avoiding the Heisenbug effect. (There does need to be some interface via which information about tracing itself can be observed, but it should be hidden from the target processes.)
It would also be nice to have something accessible via devices in the proc filesystem. Maybe something like Solaris' "proc" debugging interface would be a starting point:
http://docs.sun.com:80/ab2/coll.40.6/REFMAN4/@Ab2PageView/42351?DwebQuery=proc&Ab2Lang=C&Ab2Enc=iso-8859-1
--Mike
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