Question about libjava/childproc.c

[Martin Buchholz]

Alan: Thomas seems to be suggesting setting the FD_CLOEXEC flag after fork
but before exec, which is a slightly different idea.

Thomas: This is an interesting idea.  Historically the usual strategy was
to close all the file descriptors explicitly, perhaps before FD_CLOEXEC was
something we could rely on.  One might expect the explicit close to be more
efficient, since it involves fewer calls into libc.  As always, the process
code is rather brittle and we don't like to touch it if it's working.

We would probably want to use the idiom at
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/fcntl.html

    flags = fcntl(fd, F_GETFD);
    if (flags == -1)
        /* Handle error */;
    flags |= FD_CLOEXEC;
    if (fcntl(fd, F_SETFD, flags) == -1)
        /* Handle error */;"




On Wed, Sep 5, 2018 at 9:06 AM, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com>
wrote:

> On 05/09/2018 16:45, Thomas Stüfe wrote:
>
>> :
>>
>> My question would be, could we not - instead of straight away closing
>> the file descriptor - set them all to FD_CLOEXEC instead?
>>
>> This comes up periodically but even if we do that then we still need this
> code to catch the places where FD_CLOEXEC isn't set.
>
> Note that there a thread net-dev trying to do this for sockets. The
> scenario there seems to be someone calling fork/exec directory and not
> using ProcessBuilder. The patch under discussion is not complete but it
> helps.
>
> -Alan
>