Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 31 Mar 2003 12:48:00 -0300 | From | Werner Almesberger <> | Subject | Re: PTRACE_KILL doesn't (2.5.44 and others) |
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Andries Brouwer wrote: > First of all, it is dangerous to depend on subtle properties > of obscure calls like ptrace.
Indeed ;-) Well, there are worse things, e.g. DWARF2 information versus optimization.
> The Linux man page says
It also says (man-pages-1.56):
| For requests other than PTRACE_KILL, the child process | must be stopped.
Of course, it doesn't explicitly say that PTRACE_KILL will do anything in this case, but the wording kind of suggests that.
> Since it is not clear what the right behaviour is, it is not clear > whether there is something to fix.
Yes, that's my question. If we're trying to emulate the exact behaviour of some other OS or some specification, that would give the answer. If not, we can decide what makes sense, and, if a change would be needed for the semantics to make sense, whether it's worth making that change.
At least it seems that existing code is fine with how PTRACE_KILL works, given how long it has behaved like that. (But then, existing code may rarely use PTRACE_KILL, and may not be particularly picky about the result.)
What puzzles me a little is that kill(2) seems to do precisely what I would have expected PTRACE_KILL to do, i.e. kill the process no matter whether it's stopped or not, and detach from it. So why is there a PTRACE_KILL in the first place ?
The non-Linux man page you quote says:
| 8 This request causes the child to terminate with the | same consequences as exit(2).
Then it would make sense. Of course, this isn't what PTRACE_KILL does under Linux. Does that non-Linux man page also say anything about the exit status ?
Another subtlety, seen under 2.5.44: if PTRACE_ATTACH is immediately followed by PTRACE_KILL, PTRACE_KILL is silently ignored (no error).
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina wa@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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