Subject: Re: [bug#54997] [PATCH 04/12] Add (guix least-authority).

From: Thiago Jung Bauermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2022 17:10:19 -0300

Hello,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
> +          (reify-exit-status
> +           (call-with-container mounts
> +             (lambda ()
> +               (chdir #$directory)
> +               (environ variables)
> +               (apply execl #$program #$program (cdr (command-line))))

I'm a bit concerned about running arbitrary commands as PID 1 of process
namespaces. A process running as PID 1 (even in a child namespace) is a
special case and is treated differently by the Linux kernel than any
other process, so it needs to be a program that has been designed to
work in that situation. There are two differences from regular
processes:

1. PID 1 inherits orphan processes and needs to wait() on them when they
   quit, in order to avoid accumulating zombie processes in the system.

2. Unlike regular processes, PID 1 doesn't have default signal handlers.

Both of these aspects are described in more detail here:

https://github.com/krallin/tini/issues/8#issuecomment-146135930

So to avoid an accumulation of zombie processes and other signal-related
problems, I suggest adding a “(init-program ,tini)” parameter to
‘least-authority-wrapper’ and executing ‘program’ as a subprocess of
‘tini’ or whatever was passed as the #:init-program (perhaps #f could
mean running ‘program’ directly as PID 1).

I mention this because I'm currently dealing with a problem that has
exactly this root cause: I'm working on updating the public-inbox
package to the latest version, and the testsuite is failing because it
tests that lei's daemon process is correctly terminated. But that
doesn't work because “guix build” doesn't use a proper init program as
PID 1 and thus the daemon process goes to zombie state and the testsuite
thinks that it didn't go away. I'm hoping to send a patch to fix that
issue.

-- 
Thanks
Thiago